Reddit’s cofounder, Alexis Ohanian, took to his creation Wednesday to fight legislation he and many others believe could cripple the Internet: the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA
“If SOPA existed, Steve & I never could’ve started reddit,” he titled a post on the site, referencing fellow co-founder Steve Huffman. “Please help us win.”
Reddit’s current staff jumped into the fight as well, urging redditors to join the site’s r/SOPA section with a rare frontpage ad.
The social news site has actually played a big role in raising awareness about the issue. The r/technology section was largely responsible for gathering nearly 40,000 signatures for an anti-SOPA petition on the official White House site. And a number of SOPA posts have hit Reddit’s front page in recent days.
In congressional hearings, Colorado representative Jared Polis even cited Reddit as one of the places that SOPA will hurt.
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Meanwhile, all that special attention for r/SOPA created a traffic and subscription surge for the section. Before Ohanian’s post, only a few hundred people subscribed to the subreddit. Two days later, that number’s surpassed 4,000. Impressions shot up from 54 on Dec. 13 to an astonishing 658,162 by Dec. 15, according to traffic stats released on r/TheoryOfReddit.
As a result, serious discussion has quickly been replaced by memes and image macros. In a way, the r/SOPA traffic surge and transformation provides a perfect end-of-year microcosm of Reddit’s recent troubles: How can thoughtful textual posts survive, when image posts are so much easier to see and upvote?
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In other news some guy named Louis C.K. did an AMA and holy crap was it popular, Bear Grylls is a secret Santa, and some social media marketers are really stupid.