Overview

Reddit Recap is Reddit's version of a "Year in Review" style promotional campaign, where the platform recaps the year's most viral posts, subreddits, comments, etc., for the entire site as well as for each, individual Redditor. The feature is similar to other platforms' annual recaps like Spotify Wrapped. Reddit's version started in December 2021. Users across the platform posted memes about it going into the end of that year.

History

On December 8th, 2021, Reddit announced via a post to r/blog^[1] that they were launching "Reddit Recap 2021," including within the post a video that the company created aesthetically similar to YouTube Rewind. The post received roughly 146,000 upvotes in two days' time. Reddit also uploaded the video to YouTube ^[2] (shown below) where it gained 15,700 views and 1,300 likes in two days.

Beneath the post to r/blog, u/reddit_irl posted a comment thread that detailed the highlights from the year, stating relevant statistics like the "Most Upvoted Post of 2021" and "Top Communities in 2021," among other highlights. The "Most Upvoted Post of 2021," for example, was a post from r/WallStreetBets ^[3] that received roughly 442,000 upvotes.

News outlets like Tech Crunch^[4] published articles about the new feature on December 8th, where they noted Reddit had done recaps of site-wide statistics in years prior, but this was the first time that they were releasing personalized infographics for everyone.

Overall, Reddit Recap gave Redditors statistics on: the number of communities that they joined, the length (in "bananas") that they scrolled, subreddits that they helped grow, number of page views, most upvoted post, amount of karma they received, top comment they posted, top communities that they spent time on, as well as finishing off the recap with a Pokémon Card-esque graphic with their avatar on it.

Online Reactions

Redditors in the comments of the original r/blog^[1] post gave mostly positive affirmations of the feature. However, in two days' time, the post had received only 65% upvotes. Redditors in the comments made humorous observations, like u/clits_r_us for example, who commented, "Porn Reddit feels excluded," (shown below, left) and received roughly 8,000 upvotes in two days. Other Redditors were curious about who made the song featured in the video, like u/BadFurDay, whose comment (shown below, right) revealed the song title and artist. Their comment gained roughly 4,300 upvotes in two days.

Redditors started posting their own Recap infographics most notably on December 9th, 2021, like Redditor ma-name-jeff1234, whose post to the r/teenagers^[5] subreddit received roughly 6,100 reactions in one day. Memes were posted in subreddits like r/PrequelMemes ^[6] by Redditor BryverART, whose meme (shown below) received roughly 3,200 upvotes in less than 24 hours.

Other Redditors made memes about Recap's insistence on measuring scrolling length in "bananas." For instance, Redditor Rupertii posted a meme to r/Memes ^[7] that made a joke about Europeans and Americans using, or not using, the metric system in relation to measuring in banana length instead. The meme (shown below) received roughly 16,800 upvotes in less than 24 hours.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References