Reddit Rising: Community Site Just Had Its Coming-Out Party

President Obama's Reddit AMA Wednesday was an important moment for the intersection of politics and Internet culture. But for Reddit, the event serves as the site's coming-out party to mainstream Internet users.

From News Aggregator to News Maker

For the last 18 months, I've watched Reddit's role as a media influencer and informer rise steadily and stealthily. Reddit has increasingly become a place that I discover news, stories and issues before they bubble up to the mainstream.

I used to classify Reddit in the same bucket as other community sites such as Slashdot, Hacker News, MetaFilter, Fark and Digg. But Reddit has surpassed all of those sites when it comes to pure influence.

That was never more apparent than with the SOPA debate earlier this year. The opinions, research and plans for blackouts were discussed and disseminated from the site itself.

Rather than just being an aggregator of news, the Reddit community was making the news.

I've watched as the AMA subreddit has transformed itself — from an area where regular people with extraordinary experiences have exchanges with strangers, to a place where actors and comedians (some quite well-known) come to interact with fans and lightly promote a new project.

Still, there is a big difference between a minor celebrity and the President of the United States. Obama is no stranger to social media, having made appearances in Google+ hangouts, Twitter chats, on Facebook and on YouTube. But Reddit still felt fringe enough to be off-limits. Not any more.

A President Joins the Network

More than 200,000 users were viewing President Obama's AMA in real-time on Wednesday. That's not total users — that's concurrent users. The major cable news networks covering the Republican National Convention almost certainly had fewer viewers at 4:30pm ET.

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal criticized the content of the AMA, describing Obama's responses as "milquetoast defense after quip after simple explainer," but that misses the broader cultural point.

Instead of using any of the other media sources he could use to deliver his message, the President and his campaign advisors chose to target Reddit and Reddit users. Just as Oprah joining Twitter was seen as a turning point for that service, the President participating on Reddit is a breakthrough moment for the service.

A Tough Community to Corrupt

Understandably, some longtime Reddit users worry that more broad and mainstream attention on the service will bring with it users who alter the way the way the community exists now.

This is a common fear for nearly any web community because the nature of the beast is that as more people join, the tone and usage tends to shift.

Still, I don't see that happening to Reddit. While Reddit might be celebrating, its coming-out party, the service is hardly designed to gain users the way Twitter and Facebook have. Even Twitter, which is mentioned on television with a frequency that only rivaled by the Kardashian's, is not the service that has achieved a ubiquity in users.

Chances are, many of the people learning about Reddit from this AMA won't become frequent visitors of the site, let alone members and link karma earners. Still, they'll have a passing understanding of the community and the social legitimacy it holds.

Redditors should still start preparing themselves to see subreddits and AMAs dedicated to even more celebrities, fringe-celebrities and politicians. But the promotional value of Reddit was being exploited long before the President appeared on the service.

Earlier this summer, I advised a publicist friend to put one of her celebrity clients on Reddit for an AMA. The event was so successful, Reddit is now becoming a major outlet for her most connected clients. Some users might complain about the way the AMA concept has morphed over time, but those users can always create their own more rigidly-structured AMA subreddits.

At the end of the day, Reddit as a resource — as a community — is too big to define or for even Hollywood to corrupt overnight.

From this moment forward, however, Reddit's place in the mainstream has shifted. The influence hasn't changed — just the public perception of that influence. Reddit has made its debut.