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What is /r/circlejerk all about?

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2 Answers
Domhnall O'Huigin
Domhnall O'Huigin, I have an id.
Answered 186w ago · Author has 2.3k answers and 8.1m answer views
R/circlejerk is intended to poke fun at Reddit itself, with the name itself containing a mocking implication that it is a...uh...mutual admiration society where people endlessly congratulate themselves and the site for being who and and what they are.

It's basically a sounding board for the Reddit community, sometimes they use it to mock Reddit content, sometimes genuine grievances are aired there by redditors, and sometimes it really is just an echo chamber where discussions bounce and bounce around, morphing and branching as they develop. Much of the current hot content relates to Dave Grohl for some reason, but sprinkled about are posts and questions which are completely unrelated to....anything, really.

Of course, Reddit being Reddit, there are subreddits for taking the piss out of the subreddit for taking the piss out of Reddit. And subreddits for taking the piss out of the subreddit for taking the piss out of the subreddit for taking the piss out of Reddit (r/metacirclejerk and r/metametacirclejerk*).

That's pretty much it. R/circlejerk is a place to vent, to poke fun at Reddit or fellow redditors, to howl at the moon or post the latest meme that takes your fancy. As you feel like at the time.
I don't spend much time on Reddit except for the front page (because, while a little anarchy is interesting, total anarchy is pretty off putting) but in a way I think r/circlejerk almost symbolises many of Reddit's current woes.

Rage against Quora has shown me that you can have a forum in a social website where people can be free to post the most stringent criticism (or sometimes just that they're mad as hell and they're not going to take it any more), which - with some relatively simple and straightforward rules and a ton of focus - can be an effective tool for empowering the community in a managed way and providing the business with a key channel for excellent customer product feedback.

One of my criticisms of Reddit** is that they seemed oblivious to the need to have a managed, structured way to interact with the community. I'm not talking about 500-page procedure documents or decamillions of lines of product code here....I'd point to RaQ as above, the TW program and associated dedicated staff, meetups, blogs and so on and so forth as being really, clean, crisp ways for the business and the community to communicate.

Quora has loads of people whose jobs could in one way or another be described as community facing - clearly I have no knowledge of Reddit's setup, but the only dedicated community-facing employee I'm aware of is the person they fired. Announcements by Ellen Pao that they were dedicating new staff to be community-facing also suggests to me that they were not already in place.

R/circlejerk, could have been their RaQ (of a kind). All the jokey, uncontrolled subreddits could have continued in gleeful anarchy as before, and - if it had worked, who knows? Maybe their current situation might have been avoided?
But my feeling is there was no appetite in recent leadership at Reddit to engage with the community in a structured way. Given the community is their product (the actual website, the functionality is pretty uninspiring and non-unique***) this meant they weren't managing their business so much as riding the tiger.


* and of course now there are r/xmetacirclejerk subreddits, where x [deliberately?] goes up to 42, because if a joke is funny once, it is funny 42 times. Most of these are so obviously one-note jokes, even for Reddit, that they are sparsely populated though.
** based obviously on an outside-looking-in perspective.
*** as far as I can tell, their signature innovation, AMA, is more a process innovation, it still uses the same forum-like interface. I admit though they might have some rock-star stuff going on under the hood in terms of load balancing and so on - I'm talking about front-end functionality.
3.5k Views · View 9 Upvoters · Answer requested by Marc Bodnick
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