Happy 10th Birthday Reddit, It's Been a Glorious Shitshow

What is there to say about Reddit, the web forum that took over the internet, on its 10th birthday? After nearly 200 million posts and more than one billion comments, it's tough to say, but perhaps it's best to let the stats speak for themselves.

According to a blog post by Reddit's administrators, the most viewed post in Reddit's entire history was an "ask me anything" post by a guy with two dicks. The second most viewed post was President Barack Obama's Q&A. And this contradiction, as much as anything else, is Reddit's legacy; for better or for much, much worse.

Since the site was first switched on in 2005 by university roommates Alex Ohanian and Steve Huffman, it's ballooned into a strange and terrifying microcosm of humanity in all of its altruism and complete debaseness. This is probably due, in no small part, to the Reddit administrators' historically hands-off approach to moderating the site. When anti-harassment rules were announced this month, users revolted with swastikas and slurs.

In the last 10 years, the Reddit community has proven that it can make your funny post go viral, or it can misidentify you as a criminal. The site's members have raised money for disaster relief, and they've raised money for cancer research. On one occasion, a donation was ultimately rejected because it came from a subreddit that spread leaked celebrity nudes across the web in an incident known as "the Fappening."

Reddit has been a destination for hilarious memes and "jailbait" child porn. It's been a breeding ground for some of the most hateful misogyny on the internet—prompting co-founder Ohanian to call these kinds of users "deplorable"—and a haven for suicidal people looking for help. Reddit users have collectively raised money for a bullied, sick little girl to go shopping, and mercilessly made fun of overweight people.

Reddit's long tenure has forced us to ask tough questions about "free speech;" what it really means, what it really costs, and where the limits really lie.

Given this breadth of, uh, opinion on the site, it's probably not surprising at all that Reddit has also morphed into a digital petri dish of sorts. You can take a class on Reddit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the site offers its data to university researchers for perusal. In this catalytic environment, a simple April Fools' Day prank—a mysterious button that invited users to click it, or not—turned into a bonafide social experiment.

Will Reddit continue to make the internet an arguably better—and in turn, disgusting, upsetting, and vile—place for another 10 years? That much is anybody's guess, but for as long as Reddit remains a fixture on the internet, one thing's for sure: things are going to get pretty fucked up around here.

*Tips fedora*