Reddit, Please Don't Go So Meta

Every social platform eventually looks at Facebook's engagement numbers and thinks, "Maybe we should know who our users really are too."

Reddit, please don't.

Nobody knows you're a dog

Reddit worked because u/throwaway12345 could share their deepest fears without their boss finding out, and because u/PM_ME_YOUR_CATS could be a judge or a teenager without it mattering. The comment stood on its own.

Lately it feels like Reddit wants the opposite. With profiles front and center, you can now follow people, buy collectible avatars, slide into their chats, and earn real money for karma. The company went public this year, and after last year's API pricing fight killed off a lot of the third-party apps, it is pretty clear which way the incentives point. Nobody is asking for your real name yet, but every change nudges you a little further from the free, fully anonymous place it used to be and a little closer to a personal brand. It is a bit like watching your favourite dive bar install bottle service.

As far as I am concerned, anonymity was the feature that made Reddit work. When you take away the ego you get honesty, and when you add identity you get performance.

Bread, stapled to trees

There is a subreddit called r/BreadStapledToTrees. It has a frankly alarming number of members, all united by the singular interest of bread attached to bark, and I consider this peak humanity.

Communities like that thrive because nobody is judging you. You can be obsessed with mechanical keyboards, medieval manuscripts, or birds that look like they are wearing pants, and nobody knows whether you run a company or a petrol pump. Your contribution is judged only on whether you correctly identified that the bird was, indeed, wearing pants.

The more Reddit becomes about profiles, the more that weirdness gets washed out. Once you have a personal brand to protect, you think twice before posting in the strange little corner you actually love.

Content over creator

Twitter made everyone think they're a brand. Instagram made everyone think they're a photographer. TikTok made everyone think they're an entertainer. Reddit made everyone think.

The upvote was brutal but honest. A perfectly crafted argument could come from anyone, and if it was bad, it sank to negative karma no matter who wrote it, with no blue ticks or follower counts to rescue it.

Creator programs and chat features flip that around by putting the person above the post. I understand why, since personal brands are good for business. But for a site that was built on the post, it is backwards.

The Dunbar problem

Dunbar's number says we can keep roughly 150 meaningful relationships, because our monkey brains are not built for more.

Old Reddit understood this without ever saying it. While you had conversations there, nobody expected you to keep them going. You could argue with someone in r/Cooking about how to cook a steak and never see them again, and it was lovely.

Follow-based platforms make you maintain relationships with people you will never meet, through notifications about their posts and parasocial attachments to usernames. I am not above any of this, by the way. I run two Instagram accounts, one of them literally about coffee, so I am part of the problem. But you know the fatigue I mean, the same one that made Facebook feel like a chore and turned LinkedIn into a stage.

The feed that doesn't know you

Old Reddit's ranking was dumb in the best way. It did not know you were into conspiracy theories, so you had to go to r/conspiracy yourself. Good posts rose, bad posts sank, and the subreddit you chose decided what you saw.

The more a platform knows who you are, the more it can feed you whatever keeps you scrolling instead of whatever is worth reading. Personalized home feeds and "suggested communities" are useful, I will admit. They are also the first few steps toward the same slot machine that every other app already is.

The escape hatch

Reddit was the internet's escape hatch, the place where you could be yourself by not being yourself, where your day job had nothing to do with your poems in r/OCPoetry and your politics did not poison your gardening advice.

Every platform that puts identity ahead of ideas ends up in the same place. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn are all the same platform with different CSS.

Maybe it is inevitable, and every platform eventually gives in to the user data and the engagement graphs. Maybe I am just a guy getting nostalgic about a website.

But Reddit, you were supposed to be different. You were the place where people could argue for 500 comments about whether a hot dog is a sandwich without anyone knowing they were arguing with their neighbour.

Some of us just want to read about bread stapled to trees in peace. Is that too much to ask?