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Counting the community

Reddit surveys members to  find out who they really are

 

Kevin Morris

IRL

Posted on Jul 13, 2011   Updated on Jun 3, 2021, 4:02 am CDT

 

Who — or what — is a redditor?

The social news site’s own users often stereotype themselves as twenty-something white males who aren’t just single but, most likely are, forever alone.

But folks at Reddit HQ had a feeling their userbase is a little more diverse than that.

So to test it out, the Conde-Nast owned site announced the launch of its first demographic survey earlier today — a kind-of voluntary census of the Reddit community.

The questions are anonymous and basic: age, sex, location, income, relationship status. They’re also whimsical (or dead-serious, depending on your tastes): are you cat, dog, or turtle person? If you were a cheese, what cheese would you be?

Like a lot of things that happen at Reddit HQ, the inspiration for the survey came from the community itself.

Redditor burgess_meredith_jr created an unofficial demographic survey two months ago, and the site’s fitness subsection also recently did it’s own small survey.

“The two surveys opened our eyes,” wrote Jena Donlin, the site’s business development manager, in the blog post announcing the survey. “We are curious about who we are as a whole and what makes each sub-reddit unique.”

We’re curious, too, and will be following this data closely over the next couple of weeks.

Who knows? Maybe Redditors are less forever alone than they are just very,very interesting.

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*First Published: Jul 13, 2011, 8:53 am CDT