A history of the advice genre on Reddit: Evolutionary paths and sibling rivalries

Though there is robust literature on the history of the advice genre, Reddit is an unrecognized but significant medium for the genre. This lack of attention, in part, stems from the lack of a coherent timeline and framework for understanding the emergence of dozens of advice-related subreddits. Noting the challenges of Reddit historiography, I trace the development of the advice genre on the platform, using the metaphors of evolutionary and family trees. I make use of data dumps of early Reddit submissions and interviews with subreddit founders and moderators to plot the development of advice subreddits through the periods of subreddit explosion (2009–2010), the emergence of judgment subreddits (2011–2013; 2019–2021), and the rise of meta subreddits (2020–2023). Additionally, I specify a lexicon for understanding the relationships between subreddits using the metaphor of tree branches. For example, new subreddits might spawn, fork, or split relative to existing subreddits, and their content is cultivated by meta subreddits by way of filtration, compilation, and syndication.