Reddit and AskHistorians: Introduction and Contextualization

This talk will serve as a grounding and a guide for the internet forum AskHistorians, with the aim of providing context for an audience seeking to interrogate methods in digital outreach, but unfamiliar with this panel’s specific case study.

Specifically, presentation will detail what AskHistorians is, providing information and statistics regarding internet traffic and readership demographics. It will also detail the “game-layer” system that the community of AskHistorians terms “Flair”. Especially key to this presentation will be the rules of the subreddit and how they have evolved, focusing on how they are intended to both force and allow people to construct good and specific questions and answers within the forum.

As part of this, the introduction will also include a brief history of the host-website “Reddit”, along with a description of its structure; there will be a discussion around how such hosts influence and shape their subaltern forums (of which AskHistorians is only one of many). This presentation will end with a brief history of AskHistorians itself, focusing on concrete changes in policy which took it from a small forum with a handful of readers to a powerhouse of 350,000 regular subscribers and millions of casual visitors.

This introduction will focus closely on what AskHistorians is and how it operates, and it is conceived that anyone listening to this presentation will be equipped with enough information to fully understand the following presentations.