In what would become one of Redditu2019s first u201cviral moments,u201d the site took part in hijacking a Greenpeace contest to name a humpback whale, and pushed forth its desired moniker, u201cMister Splashy Pants,u201d to win easily. The contest was being held to raise awareness of the planned slaughter of 50 humpback whales by the Japanese Fishing Agency. Reddit users powered through and voted nearly 120 thousand times for the contestu2019s silliest submission name, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian temporarily changed Redditu2019s logo to one of Mister Splashy Pants himself.”In an early showing of Redditu2019s ground roots political potential, one of the siteu2019s users implored Stephen Colbert to organize a response to Glen Becku2019s u201cRestoring Honoru201d rally called u201cRestoring Truthiness.u201d The request garnered over 1300 replies from other Reddit users and two weeks later Colbert responded by announcing that heu00a0would actually hold the u201cRestoring Truthinessu201d rally in Washington, D.C. the following month. The rally was attended by both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, alongside thousands of others.”Few things unite Redditors more than defying government control of the Internet. In response to the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was being put before Congress in January of 2012, Reddit joined a host of other sites in u201cgoing darku201d for an entire day to express their opposition to the bill.”Reddit gained some pretty solid Internet street cred when the leader of the free world hosted an AMA on the site. A couple months before the 2012 presidential election, President Obama answered questions from the Reddit community regarding everything from his policies on NASA to how he balanced his rather demanding job with family life.
A definite highlight of the AMA was when Reddit user s0crates82 corrected a grammar mistake of the president (see photo) and received over 4500 upvotes.”In the aftermath of the horrific Boston Bombings, Reddit again garnered national headlines. This time it was for a pretty sustained witch-hunt its users conducted to find who was responsible. The Boston Bombings were especially notable due to the large amount of security footage, personal video and photographs that were publicly available to help identify possible criminals. Reddit users took it upon themselves to pour through the data, but in the process of digging engaged in some pretty dangerous behavior that left many innocent bystanders harassed and falsely accused.”Redditu2019s ugly side was showcased on a global stage when nude photos of several celebrities were leaked from their personal iCloud accounts to the Internet and a subreddit on the site, r/TheFappening, essentially curated the leak. After a few days of headlines and a number of complaints, Reddit banned the subreddit completely.”With a community as diverse as Redditu2019s, sometimes outspoken (and occasionally hateful) opinions manifest themselves in a manner that compromises the experience of other users. With the subreddit r/FatPeopleHate, the potential for damage was pretty clear and Reddit found that it had been specifically targeting and harassing users in a way that it would not tolerate. When Reddit banned the subreddit (among a few others) earlier this month, the reaction from the community could not have been stronger. While most users saw the subreddit as an ugly representation of bullying, many were also wary of what they saw as Redditu2019s worrisome policies for specifying what sentiments could and could not be expressed on the site.”
Reddit turned ten-years-old today, and it’s been quite the wild ride since University of Virginia roommates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman founded the site in 2005. Reddit has been a major news source for its hundreds of millions of unique monthly users over the past decade, but it has also been the focus of more than a few stories to go viral. Included here are some of most notable moments from Reddit history.
