Six percent of American adults who are online say they've visited Reddit, which encourages its users to submit links to stories, photos and other Web postings and then vote them up or down, according to results from a survey out Wednesday.
The report by the Pew Center's Internet and American Life project, Pew's first study of Reddit as a stand-alone platform, found that the site is most popular among younger men, with more than 18 percent saying they've visited the site, compared with 5 percent of women the same age. The gender divide holds throughout all the age groups, though the number of people who say they visit the site drops off significantly in older age groups, the study said.
As the site, which was founded in 2005 by University of Virginia classmates Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman and sold to Conde Nast in 2006, has evolved, so have its uses. And it should be no surprise that Reddit's foray into social networking would follow in the footsteps of its bigger competitors Facebook and Twitter to also become a forum for political action and for tapping into the flow of wider online discussion.