You’ve likely heard about Elon Musk’s $44 billion buyout of Twitter, the online void where everyone’s free to voice their opinions. Musk—who is, as of writing, the 6th most followed person on Twitter with 91.6M followers— wields a lot of influence on the platform. He’s certainly taken advantage of the platform to broadcast his thoughts—he’s dished out frank insights, insults, and memes in equally prolific measure.
But he isn’t happy with how things are run, openly criticizing Twitter for how it moderates content.
In fact, Musk says this acquisition stems from a burning desire to fix the so-called digital town square’s lapses when it comes to free speech.
"Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said in a statement.
This could be politically motivated—the billionaire seems to believe that the app has a left-wing bias despite its claims of neutrality.
“For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally,” Musk tweeted on April 28.
It’s important to note that Musk is just the latest billionaire to take control of a major media platform—we all know that Mark Zuckerberg founded Meta, but there’s also Jeff Bezos, who bought the Washington Post for $250M in 2013, and Steve Jobs’ wife Laurene Powell Jobs, who bought a majority stake in the Atlantic in 2017. Some think tanks view these acquisitions as a way for the ultra-rich to push their political influence and take control of the metaphorical town square.
But what makes a good town square? And is Twitter really the town square our society deserves, as Musk claims?
I’d argue it is not.
The Search For A Better Town Square
As more of our lives move online, it’s even more important for society to have a robust platform for healthy online discourse.
Reddit has the right architecture and culture to be a stronger, healthier town square than Twitter—and we dare say, has the potential to be larger than Instagram and Facebook. In a world of “fake news” and an increasingly polarized political system, Reddit is the right platform for our modern era. Let me explain why.
1. Twitter is driven by outrage, whereas Reddit is driven by quality.
On Twitter, the more likes and replies you get, the more visible your tweet becomes. Engagement is one-dimensional. This incentivizes the points of view that are the most polarizing and disincentives moderate, middle-ground points of view. Simply put, the algorithm rewards you for inciting outrage.
On Reddit, the community can both upvote and downvote. Democracy is at the heart of Reddit; this is vox populi in its most basic form. The algorithm rewards the highest-quality content with higher visibility, encouraging posts to be thorough, well-researched, and balanced. The ability for the community to downvote creates an incentive to add value to the conversation rather than spark outrage. This subtle difference dramatically elevates the level of discourse.
2. Reddit prioritizes the best content ever, whereas Twitter prioritizes the most recent content.
Twitter is fantastic for getting a pulse on what’s being talked about right now. But that product-choice—to organize content by what’s trending right now—perpetuates increasingly-shortening attention spans. Reddit, on the other hand, makes it easy to filter by the best content on a particular topic in the past week, past month, or all time.
3. Subreddits decentralize the conversation and allow us to have separate, nuanced conversations.
Every niche has a subreddit. And if there isn’t one for your niche, you can start one. This allows for more nuanced conversations on detailed topics, such as the best pee strips for measuring ketones, or the best online course in data science.
4. Reddit has spent 16 years mastering community-powered moderation. On Twitter, the content that is most-engaging wins. Period.
On Reddit, each subreddit community has moderators who can establish their own rules around quality, such as rules against self-promotion or questions that can be redirected by a bot to an FAQ. There’s a symbiotic relationship between Reddit and its human moderators, which the company respects and acknowledges. This community, in turn, elevates the level of discourse.
5. Reddit’s user growth has been careful and organic.
Reddit currently has around 430 million monthly active users, 52 million of which are daily active users. The number of monthly active users has steadily grown year on year. Meanwhile, Twitter has 396.5 million users, with 206 million daily active users.
The large difference in the number of the latter’s daily active users could be attributed to the platforms’ functionalities. Twitter is practically a void where you can say anything and everything. It’s infinitely easier to get around and post stuff there, unlike on Reddit, where you have to build up your karma to access certain privileges.
6. Reddit’s earned karma creates transparency and ties your reach to the quality of your prior content.
It doesn’t take much for one’s existence to be validated on Twitter. Anyone could be an overnight star on the platform by posting a perfectly outrageous hit tweet.
In contrast, it’s difficult to be a troll on Reddit because of its points system—you can only take part in some conversations if you have a certain number of points, and you can only earn points by building up a history of helpful, quality content. If you want to be known as an authority in your field (or in this case, in your preferred subreddit), you have to keep churning out posts and comments—and people should agree with it, or else you’d be hit by a barrage of downvotes.
7. On Reddit, what you have to say matters more than who you are.
Recently, Musk asked his followers if they think Twitter is on the decline.
“Most of these ‘top’ accounts tweet rarely and post very little content,” he tweeted on April 9 in response to a tweet about the top 10 most followed personalities on the platform—a notable list that included two politicians, five musicians, an athlete, a talk show host, and him, the richest man in the world. “Is Twitter dying?”
On the other hand, it’s frankly hard to tell who the most popular Reddit users. And that says something.
Reddit doesn’t display the number of followers a user has, but it does show who has accumulated the most karma. In this case, user CheetahSperm18 is in the top spot with an impressive 40,617,883 points as of writing. Sure, there are some famous personalities on Reddit—Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Gates come to mind—but they’re nowhere near the top of the user board.
On Reddit, it doesn’t matter if you’re a famous celebrity or a top politician. If you want to be popular over there, you have to put in the work. It’s a very simplified form of thought leadership. There are no shortcuts, and that’s one of the things that make Reddit the perfect digital town square in these times.
So, do you think Reddit is the best choice for our online thoughts? Let us know your thoughts in a comment below. While you’re at it, follow me on Reddit at u/prasidp and on Twitter at @prasid. See you there!