title: Aretha Franklin

text: In the 1960s, during a performance at the Regal Theater in Chicago, WVON radio personality Pervis Spann announced that Franklin should be crowned "the Queen of Soul". Spann ceremonially placed a crown on her head. By 1964, Franklin began recording more pop music, reaching the top 10 on the R&B chart with the ballad "Runnin' Out of Fools", in early 1965. She had two R&B charted singles in 1965 and 1966, with the songs "One Step Ahead" and "Cry Like a Baby", while also reaching the Easy Listening charts with the ballads "You Made Me Love You" and "(No, No) I'm Losing You". By the mid-1960s, Franklin was making $100,000 per year from countless performances in nightclubs and theaters. Also during that period, she appeared on rock-and-roll shows, such as "Hollywood a Go-Go" and "Shindig!" However, she struggled with commercial success while at Columbia. Label executive John H. Hammond later said he felt Columbia did not understand Franklin's early gospel background and failed to bring that aspect out further during her period there.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In November 1966, Franklin's Columbia recording contract expired; at that time, she owed the company money because record sales had not met expectations.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Producer Jerry Wexler convinced her to move to Atlantic Records. Wexler decided that he wanted to take advantage of her gospel background; his philosophy in general was to encourage a "tenacious form of rhythm & blues that became increasingly identified as soul". The Atlantic days would lead to a series of hits for Aretha Franklin from 1967 to early 1972; her rapport with Wexler helped in the creation of the majority of her peak recordings with Atlantic. The next seven years' achievements were less impressive. However, according to "Rolling Stone", "they weren't as terrible as some claimed, they were pro forma and never reached for new heights".


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In January 1967, Franklin traveled to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to record at FAME Studios and recorded the song "I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)", backed by the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Franklin only spent one day recording at FAME, as an altercation broke out between her manager and husband Ted White, studio owner Rick Hall, and a horn player, and sessions were abandoned. The song was released the following month and reached number one on the R&B chart, while also peaking at number nine on the "Billboard" Hot 100, giving Franklin her first top-ten pop single. The song's B-side, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man", reached the R&B top 40, peaking at number 37. "Respect" was Otis Redding's song but Aretha modified it with a "supercharged interlude featuring the emphatic spelling-out of the song's title". Her frenetic version was released in April and reached number one on both the R&B and pop charts. "Respect" became her signature song and was later hailed as a civil rights and feminist anthem. Upon hearing her version, Otis Redding said admiringly: "That little girl done took my song away from me." Franklin's debut Atlantic album, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You", also became commercially successful, later going gold. According to "National Geographic", this recording "would catapult Franklin to fame". Franklin scored two additional top-ten singles in 1967, "Baby I Love You" and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman".


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Working with Wexler and Atlantic, Franklin had become "the most successful singer in the nation" by 1968. In 1968, Franklin issued the top-selling albums "Lady Soul" and "Aretha Now", which included some of her most popular hit singles, including "Chain of Fools", "Ain't No Way", "Think", and "I Say a Little Prayer". That February, Franklin earned the first two of her Grammys, including the debut category for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. On February 16, Franklin was honored with a day named for her and was greeted by longtime friend Martin Luther King Jr., who gave her the SCLC Drum Beat Award for Musicians two months before his death. Franklin toured outside the US for the first time in May, including an appearance at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, where she played to a near-hysterical audience who covered the stage with flower petals. She appeared on the cover of "Time" magazine in June.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In March 1969, Franklin was unanimously voted winner of Académie du Jazz's R&B award, Prix Otis Redding, for her albums "Lady Soul", "Aretha Now", and "Aretha in Paris". That year, Franklin was the subject of a criminal impersonation scheme. Another woman performed at several Florida venues under the name Aretha Franklin. Suspicion was drawn when the fake Franklin charged only a fraction of the expected rate to perform. Franklin's lawyers contacted Florida authorities and uncovered a coercive scheme in which the singer, Vickie Jones, had been threatened with violence and constrained into impersonating her idol, whom she resembled closely both in voice and looks. After being cleared of wrongdoing, Jones subsequently enjoyed a brief career of her own, during which she was herself the subject of an impersonation.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin's success expanded during the early 1970s, during which she recorded the multi-week R&B number one "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)", as well as the top-ten singles "Spanish Harlem", "Rock Steady", and "Day Dreaming". Some of these releases were from the acclaimed albums "Spirit in the Dark" and "Young, Gifted and Black". In 1971, Franklin became the first R&B performer to headline Fillmore West, later that year releasing the live album "Aretha Live at Fillmore West".


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In January 1972, she returned to Gospel music in a two-night, live-church recording, with the album "Amazing Grace", in which she reinterpreted standards such as Mahalia Jackson's "How I Got Over". Originally released in June 1972, "Amazing Grace" sold more than two million copies, and is one of best-selling gospel albums of all time. The live performances were filmed for a concert film directed by Sydney Pollack, but due to synching problems and Franklin's own attempts to prevent the film's distribution after Hollywood refused to promote a dark-skinned black woman as a movie star at the time, the film's release was only realized by producer Alan Elliott in November 2018.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin's career began to experience problems while recording the album "Hey Now Hey", which featured production from Quincy Jones. Despite the success of the single "Angel", the album bombed upon its release in 1973. Franklin continued having R&B success with songs such as "Until You Come Back to Me" and "I'm in Love", but by 1975 her albums and songs were no longer top sellers. After Jerry Wexler left Atlantic for Warner Bros. Records in 1976, Franklin worked on the soundtrack to the film "Sparkle" with Curtis Mayfield. The album yielded Franklin's final top-40 hit of the decade, "Something He Can Feel", which also peaked at number one on the R&B chart. Franklin's follow-up albums for Atlantic, including "Sweet Passion" (1977), "Almighty Fire" (1978) and "La Diva" (1979), bombed on the charts, and in 1979 Franklin left the company. On November 7, 1979, she guested "The Mike Douglas Show" with her yellow costume from her "La Diva" album, and sang "Ladies Only", "What If I Should Ever Need You" and "Yesterday" by the Beatles.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In 1980, after leaving Atlantic Records, Franklin signed with Clive Davis's Arista Records. "Davis was beguiling and had the golden touch", according to "Rolling Stone". "If anybody could rejuvenate Franklin's puzzlingly stuck career, it was Davis."


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Also in 1980, Franklin gave a command performance at London's Royal Albert Hall in front of Queen Elizabeth. Franklin also had an acclaimed guest role as a soul food restaurant proprietor and wife of Matt "Guitar" Murphy in the 1980 comedy musical "The Blues Brothers". Franklin's first Arista album, "Aretha" (1980), featured the number-three R&B hit "United Together" and her Grammy-nominated cover of Redding's "I Can't Turn You Loose". The follow-up, 1981's "Love All the Hurt Away", included her famed duet of the title track with George Benson, while the album also included her Grammy-winning cover of Sam & Dave's "Hold On, I'm Comin'". Franklin achieved a gold record—for the first time in seven years—with the 1982 album "Jump to It". The album's title track was her first top-40 single on the pop charts in six years. The following year, she released "Get It Right", produced by Luther Vandross.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In 1985, inspired by a desire to have a "younger sound" in her music, "Who's Zoomin' Who?" became her first Arista album to be certified platinum. The album sold well over a million copies thanks to the hits "Freeway of Love", the title track, and "Another Night". The next year's "Aretha" album nearly matched this success with the hit singles "Jumpin' Jack Flash", "Jimmy Lee" and "I Knew You Were Waiting for Me", her international number-one duet with George Michael. During that period, Franklin provided vocals to the theme songs of the TV shows "A Different World" and "Together". In 1987, she issued her third gospel album, "One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism", which was recorded at her late father's New Bethel church, followed by "Through the Storm" in 1989.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In 1987, Franklin performed "America the Beautiful" at WWE's Wrestlemania III; one source states that "to this day her WrestleMania III performance might be the most memorable" of the event openers by many artists.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: After 1988, "Franklin never again had huge hits", according to "Rolling Stone". The 1991 album "What You See is What You Sweat" flopped on the charts. She returned to the charts in 1993 with the dance song "A Deeper Love" and returned to the top 40 with the song "Willing to Forgive" in 1994. That recording reached number 26 on the Hot 100 and number five on the R&B chart.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In 1989, Franklin filmed a music video for a remake of "Think". In 1990, she sang "I Want to Be Happy", "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman", and "Someone Else's Eyes" at the MDA Labor Day Telethon.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In 1995, she was selected to play Aunt Em in the Apollo Theater revival of "The Wiz". Franklin's final top 40 single was 1998's "A Rose Is Still a Rose". The album of the same name was released after the single. It sold over 500,000 copies, earning gold certification.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: That same year, Franklin received global praise after her 1998 Grammy Awards performance. She had initially been asked to perform in honor of the 1980 film "The Blues Brothers", in which she appeared with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. That evening, after the show had already begun, another performer, opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti became too ill to perform the aria "Nessun dorma" as planned. The show's producers, desperate to fill the time slot, approached Franklin with their dilemma. She was a friend of Pavarotti and had sung the aria two nights prior at the annual MusiCares event. She asked to hear Pavarotti's rehearsal recording, and after listening, agreed that she could sing it in the tenor range that the orchestra was prepared to play in. Over one billion people worldwide saw the performance, and she received an immediate standing ovation. She would go on to record the selection and perform it live several more times in the years to come. The last time she sang the aria live was for Pope Francis at the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in September 2015. A small boy was so touched by her performance that he came onto the stage and embraced her while Franklin was still singing.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Her final Arista album, "So Damn Happy", was released in 2003 and featured the Grammy-winning song "Wonderful". In 2004, Franklin announced that she was leaving Arista after more than 20 years with the label. To complete her Arista obligations, Franklin issued the duets compilation album "" in 2007. In February 2006 she performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" with Aaron Neville and Dr. John for Super Bowl XL, held in her hometown of Detroit.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In 2008, Franklin issued the holiday album "This Christmas, Aretha" on DMI Records. On February 8, 2008, Franklin was honored as the MusiCares Person of the Year, and performed "Never Gonna Break My Faith", which had won her the Grammy for best Gospel performance the year before. Twelve years later, an unheard performance of "Never Gonna Break My Faith" was released in June 2020 to commemorate Juneteenth with a new video visualizing the American human rights movement. This caused the song to enter the "Billboard" gospel charts at number one, giving Franklin the distinction of having had a number one record in every decade since the 1960s. On November 18, 2008, she performed "Respect" and "Chain of Fools" at "Dancing with the Stars".


title: Aretha Franklin

text: On January 20, 2009, Franklin made international headlines for performing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" at President Barack Obama's inaugural ceremony with her church hat becoming a popular topic online. In 2010, Franklin accepted an honorary degree from Yale University. In 2011, under her own label, Aretha's Records, she issued the album "".


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In 2014, Franklin was signed under RCA Records, controller of the Arista catalog and a sister label to Columbia via Sony Music Entertainment, and worked with Clive Davis. There were plans for her to record an album produced by Danger Mouse, who was replaced with Babyface and Don Was when Danger Mouse left the project. On September 29, 2014, Franklin performed to a standing ovation, with Cissy Houston as backup, a compilation of Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" and "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" on the "Late Show with David Letterman". Franklin's cover of "Rolling in the Deep" was featured among nine other songs in her first RCA release, "Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics", released in October 2014. In doing so, she became the first woman to have 100 songs on "Billboard" Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart with the success of her cover of Adele's "Rolling in the Deep", which debuted at number 47 on the chart.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In December 2015, Franklin gave an acclaimed performance of "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" at the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors during the section for honoree Carole King, who co-wrote the song. During the bridge of the song, Franklin dropped her fur coat to the stage, for which the audience rewarded her with a mid-performance standing ovation. Dropping the coat was symbolic according to "Rolling Stone": it "echoed back to those times when gospel queens would toss their furs on top of the coffins of other gospel queens — a gesture that honored the dead but castigated death itself".


title: Aretha Franklin

text: She returned to Detroit's Ford Field on Thanksgiving Day 2016 to once again perform the national anthem before the game between the Minnesota Vikings and Detroit Lions. Seated behind the piano, wearing a black fur coat and Lions stocking cap, Franklin gave a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that lasted more than four minutes and featured a host of improvisations. Franklin released the album "A Brand New Me" in November 2017 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, which uses archived recordings from Franklin. It peaked at number five on the "Billboard" Top Classical Albums chart before her death and rose to number two after her death.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: While Franklin canceled some concerts in 2017 due to health reasons, and during an outdoor Detroit show, she asked the audience to "keep me in your prayers", she was still garnering highly favorable reviews for her skill and showmanship. At the Ravinia Festival on September 3, 2017, she gave her last full concert. Franklin's final public performance was at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City during Elton John's 25th anniversary gala for the Elton John AIDS Foundation on November 7, 2017.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: According to Richie Unterberger, Franklin was "one of the giants of soul music, and indeed of American pop as a whole. More than any other performer, she epitomized soul at its most gospel-charged". She had often been described as a great singer and musician due to "vocal flexibility, interpretive intelligence, skillful piano-playing, her ear, her experience". Franklin's voice was described as being a "powerful mezzo-soprano voice". She was praised for her arrangements and interpretations of other artists' hit songs. According to David Remnick, what "distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalog or the cataract force of her vocal instrument; it's her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. 'Respect' is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase." Describing Franklin's voice on her first album, "Songs of Faith", released in 1956 when she was just 14, Jerry Wexler explained that it "was not that of a child but rather of an ecstatic hierophant". Critic Randy Lewis assessed her skills as a pianist as "magic" and "inspirational". Musicians and professionals alike such as Elton John, Keith Richards, Carole King, and Clive Davis were fans of her piano performances.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: From her time growing up in the home of a prominent African-American preacher to the end of her life, Franklin was immersed and involved in the struggle for civil rights and women's rights. She provided money for civil rights groups, at times covering payroll, and performed at benefits and protests. When Angela Davis was jailed in 1970, Franklin told "Jet": "Angela Davis must go free ... Black people will be free. I've been locked up (for disturbing the peace in Detroit) and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can't get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I'm going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in communism, but because she's a Black woman and she wants freedom for Black people." Her songs "Respect" and "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" became anthems of these movements for social change. Franklin and several other American icons declined to take part in performing at President Donald Trump's 2017 inauguration as a mass act of musical protest.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin was also a strong supporter of Native American rights. She quietly and without fanfare supported Indigenous peoples' struggles worldwide, and numerous movements that supported Native American and First Nation cultural rights.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Born in Memphis, Tennessee, and raised in Detroit, Michigan, Franklin moved to New York City in the 1960s where she lived until relocating to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s. She eventually settled in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Encino, where she lived until 1982. She then returned to the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills to be close to her ailing father and siblings. Franklin maintained a residence there until her death. Following an incident in 1984, she cited a fear of flying that prevented her from traveling overseas; she performed only in North America afterwards.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin was the mother of four sons. She first became pregnant at the age of 12 and gave birth to her first child, named Clarence after her father, on January 28, 1955. In one of her handwritten wills, discovered in 2019, Franklin revealed that the father was Edward Jordan. On August 31, 1957, at the age of 15, Franklin had a second child fathered by Jordan, named Edward Derone Franklin after his father. Franklin did not like to discuss her early pregnancies with interviewers. Both children took her family name. While Franklin was pursuing her singing career and "hanging out with [friends]", her grandmother Rachel and sister Erma took turns raising her children. Franklin would visit them often. Her third child, Ted White Jr., was born to Franklin and her husband Theodore "Ted" White in February 1964 and is known professionally as Teddy Richards. He provided guitar backing for his mother's band during live concerts. Her youngest son, Kecalf Cunningham, was born in April 1970 and is the child of her road manager Ken Cunningham.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin was married twice. Her first husband was Ted White, whom she married in 1961 at the age of 18. She had actually seen White the first time at a party held at her house in 1954. After a contentious marriage that was marred by domestic abuse, Franklin separated from White in 1968 and divorced him in 1969. She married actor Glynn Turman, on April 11, 1978, at her father's church. By marrying Turman, Franklin became stepmother of Turman's three children. Franklin and Turman separated in 1982 after she returned to Michigan from California and they divorced in 1984.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin's sisters, Erma and Carolyn, were professional musicians and spent years performing background vocals on Franklin's recordings. Following Franklin's divorce from Ted White, her brother Cecil became her manager and maintained that position until his death from lung cancer on December 26, 1989. Her sister Carolyn died in April 1988 from breast cancer and her eldest sister Erma died from throat cancer in September 2002. Franklin's half-brother Vaughn died in late 2002. Her half-sister, Carol Ellan Kelley (née Jennings; 1940–2019), is C. L. Franklin's daughter by Mildred Jennings, a 12-year-old member of New Salem Baptist Church in Memphis where C. L. was pastor.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin was performing at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, on June 10, 1979, when her father, C. L., was shot twice at point-blank range in his Detroit home. After six months at Henry Ford Hospital while still in a coma, C. L. was moved back to his home with 24-hour nursing care. Aretha moved back to Detroit in late 1982 to assist with the care of her father, who died at Detroit's New Light Nursing Home on July 27, 1984.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin had a long friendship with Willie Wilkerson, a Vietnam War veteran and Detroit firefighter, who also helped in her work and cared for her when ill. In 2012 she announced plans to marry Wilkerson but the engagement was quickly called off.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin's music business friends included Dionne Warwick, Mavis Staples, and Cissy Houston, who began singing with Franklin as members of the Sweet Inspirations. Houston sang background on Franklin's hit "Ain't No Way". Franklin first met Cissy's young daughter, Whitney Houston, in the early 1970s. She was made Whitney's honorary aunt (not a godmother as has been occasionally reported) and Whitney often referred to her as "Auntie Ree". Franklin had to cancel plans to perform at Whitney Houston's memorial service on February 18, 2012, due to a leg spasm.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin had weight issues for many years. In 1974, she lost on a very-low-calorie diet and maintained her new weight until the end of the decade. She again lost weight in the early 1990s, before gaining some back. A former chain smoker who struggled with alcoholism, she quit smoking in 1992. She admitted in 1994 that her smoking was "messing with my voice", but after quitting smoking she said later, in 2003, that her weight "ballooned".


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In 2010, Franklin canceled a number of concerts to have surgery for an undisclosed tumor. Discussing the surgery in 2011, she quoted her doctor as saying that it would "add 15 to 20 years" to her life. She denied that the ailment had anything to do with pancreatic cancer, as had been reported. Franklin added, "I don't have to talk about my health with anybody other than my doctors ... The problem has been resolved". Following the surgery, Franklin lost 85 lbs.; however, she denied that she had undergone weight-loss surgery. On May 19, 2011, Franklin had her comeback show at the Chicago Theatre.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In May 2013, Franklin canceled two performances because of an undisclosed medical treatment. Further concert cancellations in the summer and fall followed. During a phone interview with the Associated Press in late August 2013, Franklin stated that she had had a "miraculous" recovery from her undisclosed illness but had to cancel shows and appearances until her health was at 100%, estimating she was about "85% healed". Franklin later returned to live performing, including a 2013 Christmas concert at Detroit's MotorCity Casino Hotel. She launched a multi-city tour in mid-2014, starting with a performance on June 14 in New York at Radio City Music Hall.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In February 2017, Franklin announced in an interview with local Detroit television anchor Evrod Cassimy, that 2017 would be her final year touring. However, she scheduled some 2018 concert dates before canceling them based on her physician's advice.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: On August 13, 2018, Franklin was reported to be gravely ill at her home in Riverfront Towers, Detroit. She was under hospice care and surrounded by friends and family. Stevie Wonder, Jesse Jackson and former husband Glynn Turman visited her on her deathbed. Franklin died at her home on August 16, 2018, aged 76. She was initially thought to have died without a will. The cause of death was a malignant pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (pNET), which is distinct from the most common form of pancreatic cancer. Numerous celebrities in the entertainment industry and politicians paid tribute to Franklin, including former U.S. President Barack Obama who said she "helped define the American experience". Civil rights activist and minister Al Sharpton called her a "civil rights and humanitarian icon".


title: Aretha Franklin

text: A memorial service was held at New Bethel Baptist Church on August 19. Thousands then paid their respects during the public lying-in-repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. The August 31 Homegoing Service held at Greater Grace Temple in Detroit, included multiple tributes by celebrities, politicians, friends and family members and was streamed by some news agencies such as Fox News, CNN, The Word Network, BET and MSNBC. Among those who paid tribute to Aretha at the service were Ariana Grande, Bill Clinton, Rev. Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Faith Hill, Fantasia, the Clark Sisters, Ronald Isley, Angie Stone, Chaka Khan, Jennifer Holliday, Loretta Devine, Jennifer Hudson, Queen Latifah, Shirley Caesar, Shirma Rouse, Stevie Wonder, Eric Holder, Gladys Knight, Cedric the Entertainer, Tyler Perry, Smokey Robinson, Yolanda Adams, and Rev. Dr. William Barber II. At Franklin's request she was eulogized by Rev. Jasper Williams Jr. of Salem Baptist Church in Atlanta, as he had eulogized her father as well as speaking at other family memorials. Williams's eulogy was criticized for being "a political address that described children being in a home without a father as 'abortion after birth' and said black lives do not matter unless blacks stop killing each other". Franklin's nephew Vaughan complained of Williams: "He spoke for 50 minutes and at no time did he properly eulogize her." Following a telecast procession up Seven Mile Road, Franklin was interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in Detroit.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1979, had her voice declared a Michigan "natural resource" in 1985, and became the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded her a Grammy Legend Award in 1991, then the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. Franklin was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 1994, recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 1999, recipient of the American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award presented by Awards Council member Coretta Scott King, and was bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005 by then President George W. Bush. She was inducted into the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends Hall of Fame in 2005, and the Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame in 2015. Franklin became the second woman inducted to the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005. She was the 2008 MusiCares Person of the Year, performing at the Grammys days later. In 2019 she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation "[f]or her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades". Franklin was the first individual woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In 2010 Franklin was ranked first on "Rolling Stone" magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time" and ninth on their list of "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". Following news of Franklin's surgery and recovery in February 2011, the Grammys ceremony paid tribute to the singer with a medley of her classics performed by Christina Aguilera, Florence Welch, Jennifer Hudson, Martina McBride, and Yolanda Adams. That same year, she was ranked 19th among the "Billboard" Hot 100 All-Time top artists.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: When "Rolling Stone" listed the "Women in Rock: 50 Essential Albums" in 2002 and again 2012, it listed Franklin's 1967, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You", number one. Inducted to the GMA Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2012, Franklin was described as "the voice of the civil rights movement, the voice of black America". Asteroid 249516 Aretha was named in her honor in 2014. The next year, "Billboard" named her the greatest female R&B artist of all time. In 2018, Franklin was inducted in to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: "American history wells up when Aretha sings", President Obama explained in response to her performance of "A Natural Woman" at the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors. "Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R&B, rock and roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope." Franklin later recalled the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors as one of the best nights of her life. On June 8, 2017, the City of Detroit honored Franklin's legacy by renaming a portion of Madison Street, between Brush and Witherell Streets, Aretha Franklin Way. The Aretha Franklin Post Office Building was named in 2021, and is located at 12711 East Jefferson Avenue in Detroit, Michigan.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: In April 2021, Aretha Franklin was featured in "National Geographic" magazine and in the previous month, the society began airing the third season of the television series "Genius" about her life and career. After working with the artist for nearly four decades, Clive Davis, said that Aretha "understood the essence of both language and melody and was able to take it to a place very few—if any—could". According to "National Geographic", "she was a musical genius unmatched in her range, power, and soul".


title: Aretha Franklin

text: Franklin received honorary degrees from Harvard University and New York University in 2014, as well as honorary doctorates in music from Princeton University, 2012; Yale University, 2010; Brown University, 2009; University of Pennsylvania, 2007; Berklee College of Music, 2006; New England Conservatory of Music, 1997; and University of Michigan, 1987. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters by Case Western Reserve University 2011 and Wayne State University in 1990 and an honorary Doctor of Law degree by Bethune–Cookman University in 1975.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: After Franklin's death, fans added unofficial tributes to two New York City Subway stations: the Franklin Street station in Manhattan, served by the , and the Franklin Avenue station in Brooklyn, served by the . Both stations were originally named after other people. Although the fan tributes were later taken down, the subway system's operator, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, placed permanent black-and-white stickers with the word "Respect" next to the "Franklin" name signs in each station.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: During the American Music Awards on October 9, 2018, the show was closed by bringing Gladys Knight, Donnie McClurkin, Ledisi, Cece Winans, and Mary Mary together to pay tribute to Aretha Franklin. The "all-star" group performed gospel songs, including renditions from Franklin's 1972 album, "Amazing Grace".


title: Aretha Franklin

text: A tribute concert, "Aretha! A Grammy Celebration for the Queen of Soul", was organized by CBS and the Recording Academy on January 13, 2019, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The concert included performances by Smokey Robinson, Janelle Monáe, Alicia Keys, John Legend, Kelly Clarkson, Celine Dion, Alessia Cara, Patti LaBelle, Jennifer Hudson, Chloe x Halle, H.E.R., SZA, Brandi Carlile, Yolanda Adams and Shirley Caesar, and was recorded for television, airing on March 10.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: At the 61st Annual Grammy Awards, the ceremony was ended with a memorial tribute to the life and career of Franklin. The tribute concluded with a rendition of her 1968 hit, "A Natural Woman (You Make Me Feel Like)", performed by Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, Andra Day and Yolanda Adams.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: On January 29, 2018, Gary Graff confirmed that Jennifer Hudson would play Franklin in an upcoming biopic. Franklin's biopic "Respect" was released in August 2021 in various countries.


title: Aretha Franklin

text: On February 10, 2019, it was announced that the subject of the third season of the American National Geographic anthology television series "Genius" would be Franklin, in the "first-ever, definitive scripted miniseries on the life of the universally acclaimed Queen of Soul". The season, starring Cynthia Erivo as Franklin, was aired in March 2021. However, Franklin's family denounced the series, claiming to be uninvolved with the production process, despite the production team stating that the series had been endorsed by the Franklin estate.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit (; stylized in all lowercase as reddit) is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users (commonly referred to as "Redditors") submit content to the site such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then voted up or down by other members. Posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called "communities" or "subreddits". Submissions with more upvotes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough upvotes, ultimately on the site's front page. Reddit administrators moderate the communities. Moderation is also conducted by community-specific moderators, who are not Reddit employees.


title: Reddit

text: As of March 2022, Reddit ranks as the 9th-most-visited website in the world and 6th most-visited website in the U.S., according to Semrush. About 42–49.3% of its user base comes from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom at 7.9–8.2% and Canada at 5.2–7.8%. Twenty-two percent of U.S. adults aged 18 to 29 years, and 14 percent of U.S. adults aged 30 to 49 years, regularly use Reddit.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit was founded by University of Virginia roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, with Aaron Swartz, in 2005. Condé Nast Publications acquired the site in October 2006. In 2011, Reddit became an independent subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications. In October 2014, Reddit raised $50 million in a funding round led by Sam Altman and including investors Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Snoop Dogg, and Jared Leto. Their investment valued the company at $500 million then. In July 2017, Reddit raised $200 million for a $1.8 billion valuation, with Advance Publications remaining the majority stakeholder. In February 2019, a $300 million funding round led by Tencent brought the company's valuation to $3 billion. In August 2021, a $700 million funding round led by Fidelity Investments raised that valuation to over $10 billion. The company then reportedly filed for an IPO in December 2021 with a valuation of 15 billion dollars.


title: Reddit

text: The idea and initial development of Reddit originated with at the time college roommates Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. Huffman and Ohanian attended a lecture by programmer-entrepreneur Paul Graham in Boston, Massachusetts, during their spring break from University of Virginia. After speaking with Huffman and Ohanian following the lecture, Graham invited the two to apply to his startup incubator Y Combinator. Their initial idea, My Mobile Menu, was unsuccessful, and was intended to allow users to order food by SMS text messaging. During a brainstorming session to pitch another startup, the idea was created for what Graham called the "front page of the Internet". For this idea, Huffman and Ohanian were accepted in Y Combinator's first class. Supported by the funding from Y Combinator, Huffman coded the site in Common Lisp and together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005. Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated, an example of a fake it till you make it strategy.


title: Reddit

text: The team expanded to include Christopher Slowe in November 2005. Between November 2005 and January 2006, Reddit merged with Aaron Swartz's company Infogami, and Swartz became an equal owner of the resulting parent company, Not A Bug. Ohanian later wrote that instead of labeling Swartz as a co-founder, the correct description is that Swartz's company was acquired by Reddit 6 months after he and Huffman had started. Huffman and Ohanian sold Reddit to Condé Nast Publications, owner of "Wired", on October 31, 2006, for a reported $10 million to $20 million and the team moved to San Francisco. In November 2006, Swartz blogged complaining about the new corporate environment, criticizing its level of productivity. In January 2007, Swartz was fired for undisclosed reasons.


title: Reddit

text: Huffman and Ohanian left Reddit in 2009. Huffman went on to co-found Hipmunk with Adam Goldstein, and later recruited Ohanian and Slowe to his new company. After Huffman and Ohanian left Reddit, Erik Martin, who joined the company as a community manager in 2008 and later became general manager in 2011, played a role in Reddit's growth. "VentureBeat" noted that Martin was "responsible for keeping the site going" under Condé Nast's ownership. Martin facilitated the purchase of Reddit Gifts and led charity initiatives.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit launched two different ways of advertising on the site in 2009. The company launched sponsored content and a self-serve ads platform that year. Reddit launched its Reddit Gold benefits program in July 2010, which offered new features to editors and created a new revenue stream for the business that did not rely on banner ads. On September 6, 2011, Reddit became operationally independent of Condé Nast, operating as a separate subsidiary of its parent company, Advance Publications. Reddit and other websites participated in a 12-hour sitewide blackout on January 18, 2012, in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act. In May 2012, Reddit joined the Internet Defense League, a group formed to organize future protests.


title: Reddit

text: Yishan Wong joined Reddit as CEO in 2012. Wong resigned from Reddit in 2014, citing disagreements about his proposal to move the company's offices from San Francisco to nearby Daly City, but also the "stressful and draining" nature of the position. Ohanian credited Wong with the company's newfound success as its user base grew from 35 million to 174 million. Wong oversaw the company as it raised $50 million in funding and spun off as an independent company. Also during this time, Reddit began accepting the digital currency Bitcoin for its Reddit Gold subscription service through a partnership with bitcoin payment processor Coinbase in February 2013. Ellen Pao replaced Wong as interim CEO in 2014 and resigned in 2015 amid a user revolt over the firing of a popular Reddit employee. During her tenure, Reddit initiated an anti-harassment policy, banned involuntary sexualization, and banned several forums that focused on bigoted content or harassment of individuals.


title: Reddit

text: After five years away from the company, Ohanian and Huffman returned to leadership roles at Reddit: Ohanian became the full-time executive chairman in November 2014 following Wong's resignation, while Pao's departure on July 10, 2015, led to Huffman's return as the company's chief executive. After Huffman rejoined Reddit as CEO, he launched Reddit's iOS and Android apps, fixed Reddit's mobile website, and created A/B testing infrastructure. The company launched a major redesign of its website in April 2018. Huffman said new users were turned off from Reddit because it had looked like a "dystopian Craigslist". Reddit also instituted several technological improvements, such as a new tool that allows users to hide posts, comments, and private messages from selected redditors in an attempt to curb online harassment, and new content guidelines. These new content guidelines were aimed at banning content inciting violence and quarantining offensive material. Slowe, the company's first employee, rejoined Reddit in 2017 as chief technology officer. Reddit's largest round of funding came in 2017, when the company raised $200 million and was valued at $1.8 billion. The funding supported Reddit's site redesign and video efforts.


title: Reddit

text: On June 5, 2020, Alexis Ohanian resigned as a member of the board in response to the George Floyd protests and requested to be replaced "by a Black candidate".


title: Reddit

text: On December 13, 2020, Reddit announced it had acquired short-form video social platform Dubsmash, hiring its entire team, with the intention of integrating its video creation tools into Reddit.


title: Reddit

text: On March 5, 2021, Reddit announced that it had appointed Drew Vollero, who has worked at Snapchat's parent company Snap (SNAP), as its first Chief Financial Officer weeks after the site was thrust into the spotlight due to its role in the GameStop trading frenzy. Vollero's appointment spurred speculation of an initial public offering, a move that senior leaders have considered publicly.


title: Reddit

text: In December 2021, Reddit revealed that it had confidentially filed for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In June 2022, Reddit acquired MeaningCloud, a natural language processing company.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit is a website comprising user-generated content—including photos, videos, links, and text-based posts—and discussions of this content in what is essentially a bulletin board system. The name "Reddit" is a play-on-words with the phrase "read it", i.e., "I read it on Reddit." According to Reddit, in 2019, there were approximately 430 million monthly users, who are known as "redditors". The site's content is divided into categories or communities known on-site as "subreddits", of which there are more than 138,000 active communities.


title: Reddit

text: As a network of communities, Reddit's core content consists of posts from its users. Users can comment on others' posts to continue the conversation. A key feature to Reddit is that users can cast positive or negative votes, called upvotes and downvotes respectively, for each post and comment on the site. The number of upvotes or downvotes determines the posts' visibility on the site, so the most popular content is displayed to the most people. Users can also earn "karma" for their posts and comments, a status that reflects their standing within the community and their contributions to Reddit. Posts are sometimes automatically archived after six months, meaning they can no longer be commented or voted on.


title: Reddit

text: The most popular posts from the site's numerous subreddits are visible on the front page to those who browse the site without an account. By default for those users, the front page will display the subreddit r/popular, featuring top-ranked posts across all of Reddit, excluding not-safe-for-work communities and others that are most commonly filtered out by users (even if they are safe for work). The subreddit r/all originally did not filter topics, but as of 2021 it does not include not-safe-for-work content. Registered users who subscribe to subreddits see the top content from the subreddits to which they subscribe on their personal front pages.


title: Reddit

text: Front-page rank—for both the general front page and for individual subreddits—is determined by a combination of factors, including the age of the submission, positive ("upvoted") to negative ("downvoted") feedback ratio, and the total vote-count.


title: Reddit

text: Registering an account with Reddit is free and does not require an email address. In addition to commenting and voting, registered users can also create their own subreddit on a topic of their choosing. In Reddit style, usernames begin with "u/". For example, noteworthy redditors include u/Poem_for_your_sprog, who responds to messages across Reddit in verse, u/Shitty_Watercolour who posts paintings in response to posts, u/gallowboob, with the second-highest karma on Reddit, and u/spez, the CEO of Reddit (Steve Huffman).


title: Reddit

text: Subreddits are overseen by moderators, Reddit users who earn the title by creating a subreddit or being promoted by a current moderator. These moderators are volunteers who manage their communities, set and enforce community-specific rules, remove posts and comments that violate these rules, and generally work to keep discussions in their subreddit on topic. Admins, by contrast, are paid to work for Reddit.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit also releases transparency reports annually which have information like how many posts have been taken down by moderators and for what reason. It also details information about requests law enforcement agencies have made for information about users or to take down content. In 2020, Reddit removed 6% of posts made on their platform (approx. 233 million). More than 99% of removals were marked as spam; the remainder made up of a mix of other offensive content. Around 131 million posts were removed by the automated moderator and the rest were taken down manually.


title: Reddit

text: It is estimated that Reddit's moderators do a total of 466 hours of work every day, which totals up to $3.4 million in unpaid work each year. This roughly equates to 2.8% of the company's annual revenue.


title: Reddit

text: Subreddits (officially called communities) are user-created areas of interest where discussions on Reddit are organized. There are about 138,000 active subreddits (among a total of 1.2 million) . Subreddit names begin with "r/"; for instance, "r/science" is a community devoted to discussing scientific publications, while "r/gaming" is a community devoted to discussing video games and "r/worldnews" is for posting news articles from around the world.


title: Reddit

text: In a 2014 interview with Memeburn, Erik Martin, then general manager of Reddit, remarked that their "approach is to give the community moderators or curators as much control as possible so that they can shape and cultivate the type of communities they want". Subreddits often use themed variants of Reddit's alien mascot, Snoo, in the visual styling of their communities.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit Premium (formerly Reddit Gold) is a premium membership that allows users to view the site ad-free. Users may also be gifted coins if another user particularly valued the comment or post, generally due to humorous or high-quality content. Reddit Premium unlocks several features not accessible to regular users, such as comment highlighting, exclusive subreddits, and a personalized Snoo (known as a "snoovatar"). Reddit Gold was renamed to Reddit Premium in 2018. In addition to gold coins, users can gift silver and platinum coins to other users as rewards for quality content.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit Public Access Network, commonly known as RPAN, is a live streaming service run by Reddit. Every broadcaster is given a three-hour limit on broadcasting; however, this time limit can be extended if streamers receive Awards from other users. The viewers can interact with streams by upvoting or downvoting, chatting and by giving paid awards. During the off-air hours, 24/7 streaming is possible to the dedicated subreddits, but with limited slots and capabilities. On August 19, 2019, Reddit announced RPAN. It was said to be in testing, but they were experimenting with making it a permanent program, as well as a way to increase revenue for the platform. Later, a five-day testing period began. During the testing period, streaming was for a select group of users, allowing 30 minutes of streaming per person and 100 slots. On July 1, 2020, RPAN Studio was released, an application that allows users to broadcast live from desktop computers. RPAN Studio has been built on top of OBS, an open-source streaming and recording program. On January 28, 2021 Reddit permanently increased streaming times to three hours. RPAN was officially discontinued on November 15, 2022.


title: Reddit

text: On July 7, 2022, Reddit announced 'blockchain-backed Collectible Avatars', customizable avatars which are available on the subreddit r/CollectibleAvatars for purchase separate from Reddit Premium. The avatars were created by independent artists who post work on other subreddits, and who receive a portion of the profits. They use Reddit's Polygon blockchain-powered digital wallet the Vault. Richard Lawler of "The Verge" described them as "non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that are available for purchase in the Reddit Avatar Builder"; as NFTs are controversial, this attracted attention from many media outlets.


title: Reddit

text: On the site, redditors commemorate their "cake day" once a year, on the anniversary of the day their account was created. Cake day adds an icon of a small slice of cake next to the user's name for 24 hours.


title: Reddit

text: In 2017, Reddit developed its own real-time chat software for the site. While some established subreddits have used third-party software to chat about their communities, the company built chat functions that it hopes will become an integral part of Reddit. Individual chat rooms were rolled out in 2017 and community chat rooms for members of a given subreddit were rolled out in 2018.


title: Reddit

text: In 2019, Reddit tested a new feature which allowed users to tip others. It was only made available for a user named Chris who goes by the alias u/shittymorph, who was known for posting well-written comments, only for them to end with the same copypasta referencing the 1998 Hell in a Cell match between wrestlers The Undertaker and Mankind.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit Talk was announced in April 2021 as a competitor to Clubhouse. Reddit Talk lets subreddit moderators start audio meeting rooms that mimick Clubhouse in design. In 2022, Reddit Talk was updated to support recording audio rooms and work on the web version of Reddit. A desktop app is reportedly slated for a late February release.


title: Reddit

text: In August 2021, the company introduced a TikTok-like short-form video feature for iOS that lets users rapidly swipe through a feed of short video content.


title: Reddit

text: In December 2021, the company introduced a Spotify Wrapped-like feature called Reddit Recap that recaps various statistics from January 1 to November 30 about each individual user, such as how much time they spent on Reddit, which communities they joined, and the topics that they engaged with, and allows the user to view it.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit was originally written in Common Lisp but was rewritten in Python in December 2005 for wider access to code libraries and greater development flexibility. The Python web framework that Swartz developed to run the site, "web.py", is available as an open source project. , Reddit used Pylons as its web framework. Reddit was an open source project from June 18, 2008, until 2017. During that time, all of the code and libraries written for Reddit were freely available on GitHub, with the exception of the anti-spam/cheating portions. In a September 2017 announcement, the company stated that "we've been doing a bad job of keeping our open-source product repos up to date", partially because "open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features 'in the clear' ... without leaking our plans too far in advance", prompting the decision to archive its public GitHub repos.


title: Reddit

text: , Reddit decommissioned its own servers and migrated to Amazon Web Services. Reddit uses PostgreSQL as its primary datastore. It uses RabbitMQ for offline processing, HAProxy for load balancing and memcached for caching. In early 2009, Reddit started using jQuery.


title: Reddit

text: In 2010, Reddit released its first mobile web interface for easier reading and navigating the website on touch screen devices. For several years, redditors relied on third-party apps to access Reddit on mobile devices. In October 2014, Reddit acquired one of them, Alien Blue, which became the official iOS Reddit app. Reddit removed Alien Blue and released its official application, Reddit: The Official App, on Google Play and the iOS App Store in April 2016. The company released an app for Reddit's question-and-answer Ask Me Anything subreddit in 2014. The app allowed users to see active Ask Me Anythings, receive notifications, ask questions and vote.


title: Reddit

text: The site has undergone several products and design changes since it originally launched in 2005. When it initially launched, there were no comments or subreddits. Comments were added in 2005 and interest-based groups (called 'subreddits') were introduced in 2008. Allowing users to create subreddits has led to much of the activity that redditors would recognize that helped define Reddit. These include subreddits "WTF", "funny", and "AskReddit". Reddit rolled out its multireddit feature, the site's biggest change to its front page in years, in 2013. With the multireddits, users see top stories from a collection of subreddits.


title: Reddit

text: In 2015, Reddit enabled embedding, so users could share Reddit content on other sites. In 2016, Reddit began hosting images using a new image uploading tool, a move that shifted away from the uploading service Imgur that had been the de facto service. Users still can upload images to Reddit using Imgur. Reddit's in-house video uploading service for desktop and mobile launched in 2017. Previously, users had to use third-party video uploading services, which Reddit acknowledged was time-consuming for users.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit released its "spoiler tags" feature in January 2017. The feature warns users of potential spoilers in posts and pixelates preview images. Reddit unveiled changes to its public front page, called r/popular, in 2017; the change creates a front page free of potentially adult-oriented content for unregistered users.


title: Reddit

text: In late 2017, Reddit declared it wanted to be a mobile-first site, launching several changes to its apps for iOS and Android. The new features included user-to-user chat, a theater mode for viewing visual content, and mobile tools for the site's moderators. "Mod mode" lets moderators manage content and their subreddits on mobile devices.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit launched its redesigned website in 2018, with its first major visual update in a decade. Development for the new site took more than a year. It was the result of an initiative by Huffman upon returning to Reddit, who said the site's outdated look deterred new users. The new site features a hamburger menu to help users navigate the site, different views, and new fonts to better inform redditors if they are clicking on a Reddit post or an external link. The goal was not only for Reddit to improve its appearance, but also to make it easier to accommodate a new generation of Reddit users. Additionally, Reddit's growth had strained the site's back end; Huffman and Reddit Vice President of Engineering Nick Caldwell told "The Wall Street Journal"s COI Journal that Reddit needed to leverage artificial intelligence and other modern digital tools. Registered users can opt-out from the redesign and use "Old Reddit" which continues to use the previous design. Unregistered users can access it via old.reddit.com.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit's logo consists of a time-traveling alien named Snoo and the company name stylized as "reddit". The alien has an oval head, pom-pom ears, and an antenna. Its colors are black, white, and orange-red. The mascot was created in 2005 while company co-founder Alexis Ohanian was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia. Ohanian doodled the creature while bored in a marketing class. Originally, Ohanian sought to name the mascot S'new, a play on "What's new?", to tie the mascot into Reddit's premise as the "front page of the Internet". Eventually, the name Snoo was chosen. In 2011, Ohanian outlined the logo's evolution with a graphic that showcased several early versions, including various spellings of the website name, such as "Reditt".


title: Reddit

text: Snoo is genderless, so the logo is moldable. Over the years, the Reddit logo has frequently changed for holidays and other special events. Many subreddits have a customized Snoo logo to represent the subreddit. Redditors can also submit their own logos, which sometimes appear on the site's front page, or create their own customized versions of Snoo for their communities (or "subreddits"). When Reddit revamped its website in April 2018, the company imposed several restrictions on how Snoo can be designed: Snoo's head "should always appear blank or neutral", Snoo's eyes are orange-red, and Snoo cannot have fingers. Snoo's purpose is to discover and explore humanity.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit is a private company based in San Francisco, California. It has an office in the Mid-Market neighborhood. Reddit doubled its headcount in 2017; , it employed approximately 350 people. In 2017, the company was valued at $1.8 billion during a $200 million round of new venture funding. The company was previously owned by Condé Nast, but was spun off as an independent company. , Advance Publications, Condé Nast's parent company, retained a majority stake in Reddit.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit's key management personnel includes co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, Chief Technology Officer Chris Slowe, who was the company's original lead engineer, and Chief Operating Officer Jen Wong, a former president of digital and chief operating officer at Time Inc.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit does not disclose its revenue figures. The company generates revenue in part through advertising and premium memberships that remove ads from the site.


title: Reddit

text: As part of its company culture, Reddit operates on a no-negotiation policy for employee salaries. The company offers new mothers, fathers, and adoptive parents up to 16 weeks of parental leave.


title: Reddit

text: As of August 2021, Reddit is valued at more than $10 billion following a $410 million funding round. The company is looking to hire investment bankers and lawyers to assist in making an initial public offering, which is expected in 2022. However, CEO Steve Huffman says the company has not decided on the timing for when to go public. In December 2021, Reddit announced they had filed a draft registration statement with the SEC regarding their prospective IPO.


title: Reddit

text: In February 2013, Betabeat published a post that recognized the influx of multinational corporations like Costco, Taco Bell, Subaru, and McDonald's posting branded content on Reddit that was made to appear as if it was original content from legitimate Reddit users. PAN Communications wrote that marketers want to "infiltrate the reddit community on behalf of their brand," but emphasized that "self-promotion is frowned upon" and Reddit's former director of communications noted that the site is "100 percent organic." She recommended that advertisers design promotions that "spark conversations and feedback." She recommended that businesses use AMAs to get attention for public figures but cautioned "It is important to approach AMAs carefully and be aware that this may not be a fit for every project or client." Nissan ran a successful branded content promotion offering users free gifts to publicize a new car, though the company was later ridiculed for suspected astroturfing when the CEO only answered puff piece questions on the site. Taylor described these situations as "high risk" noting: "We try hard to educate people that they have to treat questions that may seem irreverent or out of left field the same as they would questions about the specific project they are promoting."


title: Reddit

text: Reddit's users tend to be more privacy-conscious than on other websites, often using tools like AdBlock and proxies, and they dislike "feeling manipulated by brands" but respond well to "content that begs for intelligent viewers and participants." Lauren Orsini writes in ReadWrite that "Reddit's huge community is the perfect hype machine for promoting a new movie, a product release, or a lagging political campaign" but there is a "very specific set of etiquette. Redditors don't want to advertise for you, they want to talk to you." Journalists have used the site as a basis for stories, though they are advised by the site's policies to respect that "reddit's communities belong to their members" and to seek proper attribution for people's contributions.


title: Reddit

text: Since 2017, Reddit has partnered with companies to host sponsored AMAs and other interactive events, increased advertising offerings, and introduced efforts to work with content publishers.


title: Reddit

text: In 2018, Reddit hired Jen Wong as COO, responsible for the company's business strategy and growth, and introduced native mobile ads. Reddit opened a Chicago office to be closer to major companies and advertising agencies located in and around Chicago. In 2019, Reddit hired former Twitter ad director Shariq Rizvi as its vice president of ad products and engineering.


title: Reddit

text: The website is known for its open nature and diverse user community that generate its content. Its demographics allows for wide-ranging subject areas, as well as the ability for smaller subreddits to serve more niche purposes. The possibilities that subreddits provide create new opportunities for raising attention and fostering discussion across various areas. In gaining popularity in terms of unique users per day, Reddit has been a platform to raise publicity for a number of causes. Additionally, the user base of Reddit has given birth to other websites, including image sharing community and image host Imgur, which started in 2009 as a gift to Reddit's community. In its first five months, it jumped from a thousand hits per day to a million total page views.


title: Reddit

text: Statistics from Google Ad Planner suggest that 74% of Reddit users are male. In 2016, the Pew Research Center published research showing that 4% of U.S. adults use Reddit, of which 67% are men. 78% of users get news from Reddit. Users tend to be significantly younger than average with less than 1% of users being 65 or over. Politically, Reddit's community is predominantly left-leaning, with less than 19% of its users leaning to the right.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit is known in part for its passionate user base, which has been described as "offbeat, quirky, and anti-establishment". Similar to the "Slashdot effect", the Reddit effect occurs when a smaller website crashes due to a high influx of traffic after being linked to on Reddit; this is also called the Reddit "hug of death".


title: Reddit

text: Users have used Reddit as a platform for their charitable and philanthropic efforts. Redditors raised more than $100,000 for charity in support of comedians Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear; more than $180,000 for Haiti earthquake relief efforts; and delivered food pantries' Amazon wish lists. In 2010, Christians, Muslims, and atheists held a friendly fundraising competition, where the groups raised more than $50,000. A similar donation drive in 2011 saw the atheism subreddit raise over $200,000 for charity. In February 2014, Reddit announced it would donate 10% of its annual ad revenue to non-profits voted upon by its users. As a result of the campaign, Reddit donating $82,765 each to Electronic Frontier Foundation, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Doctors Without Borders, Erowid Center, Wikimedia Foundation, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, NPR, Free Software Foundation, Freedom From Religion Foundation, and Tor Project.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit has been used for a wide variety of political engagement including the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders. It has also been used for self-organizing sociopolitical activism such as protests, communication with politicians and active communities. Reddit has become a popular place for worldwide political discussions.


title: Reddit

text: The March for Science originated from a discussion on Reddit over the deletion of all references to climate change from the White House website, about which a user commented that "There needs to be a Scientists' March on Washington". On April 22, 2017, more than 1 million scientists and supporters participated in more than 600 events in 66 countries across the globe.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit users have been engaged in the defense of Internet privacy, net neutrality and Internet anonymity.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit created an Internet blackout day and was joined by Wikipedia and other sites in 2012 in protest of the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts. On January 18, Reddit participated in a 12-hour sitewide blackout to coincide with a congressional committee hearing on the measures. During that time, Reddit displayed a message on the legislation's effects on Reddit, in addition to resources on the proposed laws. In May 2012, Reddit joined the Internet Defense League, a group formed to organize future protests.


title: Reddit

text: The site and its users protested the Federal Communications Commission as it prepared to scrap net neutrality rules. In 2017, users upvoted "Battle for the Net" posts enough times that they filled up the entire front page. On another day, the front page was overtaken by posts showcasing campaign donations received by members of Congress from the telecommunications industry. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has also advocated for net neutrality rules. In 2017, Huffman told "The New York Times" that without net neutrality protections, "you give internet service providers the ability to choose winners and losers". On Reddit, Huffman urged redditors to express support for net neutrality and contact their elected representatives in Washington, D.C. Huffman said that the repeal of net neutrality rules stifles competition. He said he and Reddit would continue to advocate for net neutrality.


title: Reddit

text: As a response to Glenn Beck's August 28, 2010, Restoring Honor rally, in September 2010 Reddit users started a movement to persuade satirist Stephen Colbert to have a counter-rally in Washington, D.C. The movement, which came to be called "Restoring Truthiness", was started by user mrsammercer, in a post where he described waking up from a dream in which Stephen Colbert was holding a satirical rally in D.C. Over $100,000 was raised for charity to gain the attention of Colbert. The campaign was mentioned on-air several times, and when the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was held in Washington, D.C. on October 30, 2010, thousands of redditors made the journey.


title: Reddit

text: During a post-rally press conference, Reddit co-founder Ohanian asked, "What role did the Internet campaign play in convincing you to hold this rally?" Jon Stewart responded by saying that, though it was a very nice gesture, he and Colbert had already thought of the idea and the deposit for using the National Mall was already paid during the summer, so it acted mostly as a "validation of what we were thinking about attempting". In a message to the Reddit community, Colbert later added, "I have no doubt that your efforts to organize and the joy you clearly brought to your part of the story contributed greatly to the turnout and success."


title: Reddit

text: Since May 2014, Reddit has been blocked in Indonesia by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology for hosting content containing nudity.


title: Reddit

text: In August 2015, Russia banned Reddit after Russia's Federal Drug Control Service decided that Reddit promoted conversations about psychedelic drugs. The site was later unblocked.


title: Reddit

text: In June 2015, Reddit was blocked in China for a few weeks. The site was unblocked later. It was then re-blocked in August 2018 and has remained blocked ever since.


title: Reddit

text: ISPs in India were found to be blocking traffic over Reddit for intermittent periods in some regions in 2019.


title: Reddit

text: On April Fools' Day 2010, Reddit's first massive April Fool's social experiment was to make everyone on site an admin. For 24 hours, users could ban one another, modify upvotes, delete comments, and votes. Any modifications to Reddit only occurred through the user's perspective. While many caught on, others began threatening fellow users with their admin privileges and went on mini power trips, demonstrating that great power is not always accompanied by great responsibility.


title: Reddit

text: On April Fools' Day 2011, Reddit replaced its Reddit Gold subscription with Reddit Mold, a joke version of the premium service that could be given to users to make the website experience worse. For example, users who were given Mold would only be able to see fewer posts per page as well as not being able to post anything containing the letter E. These effects were amplified upon receiving more Mold, such as losing the ability to post another letter for each Mold received.


title: Reddit

text: On April Fools' Day 2013, Reddit claimed that it had acquired the video game "Team Fortress 2", and initiated a site-wide event where users were randomly assigned into two teams, Orangered and Periwinkle, based on both the colors of the "Team Fortress 2" teams as well as the colors of the upvote and downvote buttons. As in "Team Fortress 2", users were randomly given items and cosmetics to use, most importantly weapons to use against users on the opposing team. Valve also participated in the event, updating "Team Fortress 2" with Reddit related cosmetics. When the event ended, team Orangered was declared the victor.


title: Reddit

text: For April Fools' Day 2014, Reddit did "headdit", a joke way to navigate and use the website using the webcam.


title: Reddit

text: For April Fools' Day 2015, a social experiment subreddit called r/thebutton appeared. It displayed a button and a 60-second countdown timer. User accounts created before that day were eligible to participate. A user could only click the button once, or opt not to click it. If a user clicked the button the timer was globally reset to 60 seconds, and the user's "flair" (an icon next to the user's name) changed color. Colors were assigned based on a gradient from purple to red with purple signifying up to 60 seconds and red as low as 0 seconds. The countdown reached zero several times due to technical problems but eventually expired without further problems on June 5, 2015, after which the subreddit was archived.


title: Reddit

text: For April Fools' Day 2016, another experiment was launched involving the "Robin" chat widget. After clicking a titular button, an IRC-like chat window was opened with one other user, and allowed a certain time to pick among three options: "Grow", "Stay" and "Leave". "Grow" would join the chat with another group, "Stay" would close the group chat and create a subreddit with that group as moderators and "Leave" would close the group chat.


title: Reddit

text: For April Fools' Day 2017, featured a social experiment based on r/place. The subreddit contained a collaborative pixel art canvas, where a user could place a pixel every five minutes (the timer was temporarily ten and twenty minutes for a few hours on April 1). Many people worked together to create large graphics, such as flags or symbols. Often subreddits would come together as a group to add a graphic from that community to place. Place was closed on April 3, 2017, at 1:00 PM GMT having been active for a full three days.


title: Reddit

text: For April Fools' Day 2018, an experiment launched on the subreddit r/circleoftrust. Upon clicking a button, each user was given one "circle" that they could entrust to others with the circle's password key to unlock and join the circle. While each user received one personal circle, they could join or betray any other user circles. Clicking the "join" button on another's circle would cause the owner's circle to grow bigger, while the "betray" button would cause the owner's circle to no longer function (having "betrayed" the owner's trust). On the r/circleoftrust subreddit, all users have a "flair" next to their username that displays the number of users who've joined their personal circle, followed by the number of other circles the user has joined. Those who had betrayed another user's circle have a null sign ("∅") next to their numbered flair. The experiment ended on April 6, 2018.


title: Reddit

text: For April Fools' Day 2019, a social experiment subreddit called r/sequence was released. The experiment consisted of a community-driven sequencer that users interacted with by submitting GIFs or text slides to be compiled into a movie. The order of the GIFs and text slides were chosen by users through upvoting one GIF or text slide per scene. The most upvoted GIF or text slide was locked into the next available scene for every three minutes. At the end, once the entire sequence was filled, it was posted as a full story in an external page. The experiment ended at April 3, 2019, 11:08 PM GMT.


title: Reddit

text: For April Fools' Day 2020, r/imposter was released. Users were to identify a machine-generated response from a group of responses to the question "What makes you human?" (and, later, "What makes you an imposter?") and had an option to respond to the question after doing so. The experiment ended on April 3, 2020.


title: Reddit

text: For April Fools' Day 2021, Reddit released r/second, in which users have to guess the second most popular option out of a group of three options. The event ended after 2000 one-minute rounds, with the final round lasting one hour.


title: Reddit

text: For April Fools' Day 2022, Reddit once again featured r/place, similar to the event featured in 2017. The subreddit featured a 1000 x 1000 pixel collaborative canvas which users could edit the color of a single pixel every five minutes. The event began on April 1, 2022 at 1:00 PM GMT, and would be live for 87 hours. On the second day of r/place, the canvas was expanded from 1000 x 1000 to 2000 x 1000, allowing for more artwork. On the third day of r/place, the canvas was once again expanded from 2000 x 1000 to 2000 x 2000. Before the event ended, users were only allowed to place white pixels, reverting the canvas back to its original state.


title: Reddit

text: AMAs, or "Ask Me Anything" interviews, are among Reddit's most popular features. , r/IAmA, which is the most popular community for AMAs, was the eighth most popular subreddit on the site with 17.7 million subscribers. During an AMA on r/IAmA and other subreddits, users can ask questions to interviewees. Notable participants include former-United States President Barack Obama (while campaigning for the 2012 election), Bill Gates (multiple times), and Donald Trump (also while campaigning). AMAs have featured CEO Steve Huffman, as well as figures from entertainment industries around the world (including Priyanka Chopra and George Clooney), literature (Margaret Atwood), space (Buzz Aldrin), privacy (Edward Snowden), fictional characters (including Borat and Cookie Monster) and others, such as experts who answered questions about the transgender community. "The Atlantic" wrote that an AMA "imports the aspirational norms of honesty and authenticity from pseudonymous Internet forums into a public venue".


title: Reddit

text: RedditGifts was a program that offers gift exchanges throughout the year. The fan-made RedditGifts site was created in 2009 for a Secret Santa exchange among Reddit users, which has since become the world's largest and set a Guinness World record. In 2009, 4,500 redditors participated. For the 2010 holiday season, 92 countries were involved in the secret Santa program. There were 17,543 participants, and $662,907.60 was collectively spent on gift purchases and shipping costs. In 2014, about 200,000 users from 188 countries participated. Several celebrities have participated in the program, including Bill Gates, Alyssa Milano, and Snoop Dogg. Eventually, the secret Santa program expanded to various other occasions through RedditGifts, which Reddit acquired in 2011.


title: Reddit

text: On June 9, 2021, Reddit announced the shutdown of Reddit Gifts, effective at the conclusion of the 2021 Secret Santa exchange; new account registration was disabled when the announcement was issued.


title: Reddit

text: The online Reddit community conducts real-world meetups across the globe each summer. These in-person meetups are called Global Reddit Meetup Day.


title: Reddit

text: Reddit communities occasionally coordinate Reddit-external projects such as skewing polls on other websites, like the 2007 incident when Greenpeace allowed web users to decide the name of a humpback whale it was tracking. Reddit users voted en masse to name the whale "Mr. Splashy Pants", and Reddit administrators encouraged the prank by changing the site logo to a whale during the voting. In December of that year, Mister Splashy Pants was announced as the winner of the competition.


title: Reddit

text: The website generally allows subreddit moderators to make editorial decisions about what content to allow. Many of the default subreddits are highly moderated, with the "science" subreddit banning climate change denialism, and the "news" subreddit banning opinion pieces and columns. Reddit has changed its site-wide editorial policies several times, sometimes in reaction to controversies. Reddit has historically been a platform for objectionable but legal content, and in 2011, news media covered the way that jailbait was being shared on the site before the site changed their policies to explicitly ban "suggestive or sexual content featuring minors". Following some controversial incidents of Internet vigilantism, Reddit introduced a strict rule against the publication of non-public personally-identifying information via the site (colloquially known as doxxing). Those who break the rule are subject to a site-wide ban, which can result in the deletion of their user-generated content.


title: Reddit

text: Following the Boston Marathon bombing in April, Reddit faced criticism after users wrongly identified a number of people as suspects. Notable among misidentified bombing suspects was Sunil Tripathi, a student reported missing before the bombings took place. A body reported to be Sunil's was found in Providence River in Rhode Island on April 25, according to Rhode Island Health Department. The cause of death was not immediately known, but authorities said they did not suspect foul play. The family later confirmed Tripathi's death was a result of suicide. Reddit general manager Martin later issued an apology for this behavior, criticizing the "online witch hunts and dangerous speculation" that took place on the website. The incident was later referenced in the season 5 episode of the CBS TV series "The Good Wife" titled "Whack-a-Mole", as well as "The Newsroom".


title: Reddit

text: In August, private sexual photos from the celebrity photo hack were widely disseminated across the site. A dedicated subreddit, "TheFappening", was created for this purpose, and contained links to most if not all of the criminally obtained explicit images. Some images of McKayla Maroney and Liz Lee were identified by redditors and outside commentators as child pornography because the photos were taken when the women were underage. The subreddit was banned on September 6. The scandal led to wider criticisms concerning the website's administration from "The Verge" and "The Daily Dot".


title: Reddit

text: On December 18, Reddit took a criticized action of banning a subreddit, "SonyGOP", that was being used to distribute hacked Sony files.


title: Reddit

text: After Ellen Pao became CEO, she was initially a target of criticism by users who objected to the deletion of content critical of herself and her husband. Later on June 10, Reddit shut down the 150,000-subscriber "fatpeoplehate" subreddit and four others citing issues related to harassment. This move was seen as very controversial; some commenters said that the bans went too far, while others said that the bans did not go far enough. One of the latter complaints concerned a subreddit that was "expressing support" for the perpetrator of the Charleston church shooting. Responding to the accusations of "skewed enforcement", Reddit reaffirmed their commitment to free expression and stated, "There are some subreddits with very little viewership that get highlighted repeatedly for their content, but those are a tiny fraction of the content on the site."


title: Reddit

text: On July 2, Reddit began experiencing a series of blackouts as moderators set popular subreddit communities to private, in an event dubbed "AMAgeddon", a portmanteau of AMA ("ask me anything") and Armageddon. This was done in protest of the recent firing of Victoria Taylor, an administrator who helped organize citizen-led interviews with famous people on the popular AMA subreddit. Organizers of the blackout also expressed resentment about the recent severance of the communication between Reddit and the moderators of subreddits. The blackout intensified on July 3 when former community manager David Croach gave an AMA about being fired. Before deleting his posts, he stated that Ellen Pao dismissed him with one year of health coverage when he had cancer and did not recover quickly enough. Following this, a Change.org petition to remove Pao as CEO of Reddit Inc. reached over 200,000 signatures. Pao posted a response on July 3 as well as an extended version of it on July 6 in which she apologized for bad communication and not delivering on promises. She also apologized on behalf of the other administrators and noted that problems already existed over the past several years. On July 10, Pao resigned as CEO and was replaced by former CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman.


title: Reddit

text: In August, Steve Huffman introduced a policy which led to the banning of several offensive and sexual communities. Included in the ban was lolicon, to which Huffman referred as "animated CP [child porn]". Some subreddits had also been "quarantined" due to having "highly-offensive or upsetting content" such as r/European, r/swedenyes, r/drawpeople, r/kiketown, r/blackfathers, r/greatapes, and r/whitesarecriminals.


title: Reddit

text: In May, Steve Huffman said in an interview at the TNW Conference that, unlike Facebook, which "only knows what [its users are] willing to declare publicly", Reddit knows its users' "dark secrets" at the same time that the website's "values" page was updated in regards to its "privacy" section. The video reached the top of the website's main feed. Shortly thereafter, announcements concerning new advertisement content drew criticism on the website.


title: Reddit

text: In September, a user named "mormondocuments" released thousands of administrative documents belonging to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, an action driven by the ex-Mormon and atheist communities on Reddit. Previously, on April 22, the same user had announced his plans to do so. Church officials commented that the documents did not contain anything confidential.


title: Reddit

text: On November 23, Huffman admitted to having replaced his user name with the names of r/The_Donald moderators in many insulting comments. He did so by changing insulting comments made towards him and made it appear as if the insult were directed at the moderators of r/The_Donald.


title: Reddit

text: On November 24, "The Washington Post" reported Reddit had banned the "Pizzagate" conspiracy board from their site, stating it violated their policy of posting personal information of others, triggering a wave of criticism from users on r/The_Donald, who felt the ban amounted to censorship. After the forum was banned from Reddit, the words "we don't want witchhunts on our site" now appears on the former page of the Pizzagate subreddit.


title: Reddit

text: On November 30, Huffman announced changes to the algorithm of Reddit's r/all page to block "stickied" posts from a number of subreddits, such as r/The_Donald. In the announcement, he also apologized for personally editing posts by users from r/The_Donald, and declared intentions to take actions against "hundreds of the most toxic users" of Reddit and "communities whose users continually cross the line".


title: Reddit

text: In February, Reddit banned the alt-right subreddit r/altright for violating its terms of service, more specifically for attempting to share private information about the man who attacked alt-right figure Richard B. Spencer. The forum's users and moderators accused Reddit administrators of having political motivations for the ban.


title: Reddit

text: On July 12, the creator and head moderator of the GamerGate subreddit, r/KotakuInAction, removed all of the moderators and set the forum to private, alleging it to have become "infested with racism and sexism". A Reddit employee restored the forum and its moderators an hour later.


title: Reddit

text: In January, the Filipino-themed subreddit r/jakolandia was accused of "distributing" posts of photos of women, including celebrities, apparently without their consent, similar to "a number" of secret Facebook groups that had been engaging in illegal activity of sharing "obscene" photos of women and possibly child pornography.


title: Reddit

text: In February, Chinese company Tencent invested $150 million into Reddit. This resulted in a large backlash from Reddit users, who were worried about potential censorship. Many posts featuring subjects censored in China, such as Tiananmen Square, Tank Man, and Winnie the Pooh, received popularity on Reddit.


title: Reddit

text: During the George Floyd protests in early June, over 800 moderators signed an open letter demanding a policy banning hate speech, a shutdown of racist and sexist subreddits, and more employee support for moderation. Bloomberg News pointed out the company's slow reaction to r/watchpeopledie, a subreddit dedicated to videos of people dying in accidents and other situations, and the harassment that accompanied new unmoderated features like icons for purchase and public chats.


title: Reddit

text: On June 29, Reddit updated its content policy and introduced rules aimed at curbing the presence of communities they believed to be "promoting hate", and banned approximately 2,000 subreddits that were found to be in violation of the new guidelines on the same day. Larger subreddits affected by the bans included r/The_Donald, r/GenderCritical (the platform's largest and most active anti-transgender radical feminist subreddit), and r/ChapoTrapHouse (a far-left subreddit originally created by fans of the podcast "Chapo Trap House"). Some media outlets and political commentators also condemned the banning of the r/The_Donald and r/ChapoTrapHouse subreddits as a violation of the right to free political expression.


title: Reddit

text: After the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, Reddit banned the subreddit r/DonaldTrump in response to repeated policy violations and alluding to the potential influence the community had on those who participated in or supported the storming. The move followed similar actions from social media platforms, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and more. The ban was criticized by those who believed it furthered an agenda and censorship of conservative ideologies. The subreddit had over 52,000 members just before it was banned.


title: Reddit

text: In March, Reddit users discovered that Aimee Challenor, an English politician who had been suspended from two UK political parties, was hired as an administrator for the site. Her first suspension from the Green Party came for retaining her father as her campaign manager after his arrest on child sexual abuse charges. She was later suspended from the Liberal Democrats after tweets describing pedophilic fantasies were discovered on her partner's Twitter account. Reddit banned a moderator for posting a news article which mentioned Challenor, and some Reddit users alleged that Reddit were removing all mention of Challenor. A large number of subreddits, including r/Music which had 27million subscribers, and 46 other subreddits with over 1million subscribers, went private in protest. On March 24, Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman said that Challenor had been inadequately vetted before being hired and that Reddit would review its relevant internal processes. Huffman attributed user suspensions to over-indexing on anti-harassment measures. Challenor was also removed from her role as a Reddit admin.


title: Reddit

text: In late August, more than 70 subreddits went private to protest against COVID-19 misinformation on Reddit, as well as Reddit's refusal to delete subreddits undermining the severity of the pandemic.


title: Reddit

text: In July 2022, Reddit banned the use of the word "groomer" as a slur against LGBTQ+ people, in addition to categorizing claims that transgender people are mentally ill as hate speech.


title: Reddit

text: Aggregate Reddit user data has been used for scientific research. For example, a 2014 study showed how subreddits can support role-based group recommendations or provide evaluation towards group stability and growth. Another study evoked a connection between cognitive and attention dynamics and the usage of online social peer production platforms, including the effects of deterioration of user performance. There is also work that has studied the influence of Reddit posts on the popularity of Wikipedia content. A participant-observation study of April Fools' Day 2017 social experiment on r/place identified top-down and bottom-up coordination mechanisms, rules and emergence, and analyse their relative impact on the collaboratively created artwork, revealing cooperation and conflict, using qualitative and quantitative methods.


title: Josh Brolin

text: Joshua James Brolin (; born February 12, 1968) is an American actor. He has appeared in films such as "The Goonies" (1985), "Mimic" (1997), "Hollow Man" (2000), "Grindhouse" (2007), "No Country for Old Men" (2007), "American Gangster" (2007), "W." (2008), "Milk" (2008), "True Grit" (2010), and "Men in Black 3" (2012). He has also appeared in films such as "Oldboy" (2013), "Inherent Vice" (2014), "Everest" (2015), "Sicario" (2015), "Hail, Caesar!" (2016), and "Deadpool 2" (2018) in addition to playing Marvel Comics supervillain Thanos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.


title: Josh Brolin

text: In the MCU, he appeared as Thanos in "Guardians of the Galaxy" (2014), "" (2015) and later starring in "" (2018) and "" (2019). In 2021, he returned to provide the voice for an alternate timeline version of Thanos in the animated series "What If...?" and portrayed Gurney Halleck in Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi epic "Dune" (2021) and in the in 2023. In 2022, he starred in the supernatural mystery series "Outer Range".


title: Josh Brolin

text: He is the recipient of several accolades, including a Critics' Choice Movie Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a nomination for an Academy Award.


title: Josh Brolin

text: Brolin was born on February 12, 1968, in Santa Monica, California, the son of Jane Cameron (Agee), a wildlife activist who was a native of Corpus Christi, Texas, and actor James Brolin. Brolin was raised on a ranch in Templeton, California, with little exposure to his father's acting career. His parents divorced in 1984, when he was 16 years old.


title: Josh Brolin

text: Brolin said in a 2014 interview that during his youth, he was a member of a surfing friendship group who called themselves the "Cito Rats". In his description of the group, he said, "It was Santa Barbara. It was the '80s. It was punk rock. You either had the children of rich, neglectful parents or children of poor, so it was a mix. But we basically grew up the same way. I've never seen a group like that before or since." He admitted to stealing cars to pay for his drug use, which included heroin, a drug that he explained he did not like: "I mean, I never got into it and I never died from it, which is a good thing. I've had 19 friends who died. Most of those guys I grew up with, they're all dead now."


title: Josh Brolin

text: Brolin started his career in TV films and guest roles on TV shows before landing a more notable role as Brandon Walsh in the Richard Donner-directed film "The Goonies" (1985). He was considered for the role of Tom Hanson in the series "21 Jump Street"; he and Johnny Depp were the finalists for the role, and the two became close and remained friends. The role ultimately went to Depp. Brolin guest-starred in an episode of the show in its first season.


title: Josh Brolin

text: Brolin played a small role in the 1994 movie "Roadflower". He has implied that he turned away from film acting for years after the premiere of his second film, "Thrashin'", where he witnessed what he called "horrendous" acting on his part. For several years, he appeared in stage roles in Rochester, New York, often alongside mentor and friend Anthony Zerbe. One of Brolin's more prominent roles early in his career was that of "Wild Bill" Hickok in the ABC western TV series "The Young Riders", which lasted three seasons (1989–92). Two other TV series he was involved in include the Aaron Spelling production "Winnetka Road" (1994) and "Mister Sterling" (2003), both of which were cancelled after a few episodes.


title: Josh Brolin

text: Brolin's film work consists of many villainous roles in late-2000s/early-2010s films, including "Planet Terror" (one of two feature-length segments of the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez collaboration "Grindhouse"), "American Gangster", and Oliver Stone's "". He also played the lead role in the Coen brothers' Academy Award-winning film "No Country for Old Men".


title: Josh Brolin

text: In 2008, Brolin starred in another Oliver Stone film, "W.", a biopic about key events in the life of President George W. Bush. Stone pursued an initially hesitant Brolin for the role. He said of his decision to cast Brolin in the leading role:


title: Josh Brolin

text: Brolin received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Gus Van Sant's biopic "Milk" as city supervisor Dan White, who assassinated San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone. He made news by wearing a White Knot to the Academy Awards ceremony to demonstrate solidarity with the same-sex marriage movement. Brolin told an interviewer that co-star Sean Penn, who portrayed Milk, decided to dispel any nerves the actors had about playing gay men by "grabbing the bull by the horns". At the first cast dinner, which included castmates James Franco, Emile Hirsch and Diego Luna, "[Penn] walked right up and grabbed me and planted a huge one right on my lips", Brolin said. Brolin has received critical acclaim for his performance and, in addition to his Oscar nomination, received NYFCC and NBR Awards for Best Supporting Actor and a nomination for a SAG Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role.


title: Josh Brolin

text: In 2010, Brolin portrayed the titular character in "Jonah Hex", based on the DC Comics' character with the same name. Brolin later played the younger version of Tommy Lee Jones's character Kevin Brown / Agent K in "Men in Black 3" in 2012, which reunited both Brolin and Jones after their initial colaboration in "No Country for Old Men" and "In the Valley of Elah", both in 2007. Brolin later starred in the 2013 film "Gangster Squad", portraying a fictional World War II veteran named John O'Mara. He also portrayed Joe Doucett in "Oldboy", a remake of the 2003 South Korean film of the same name.


title: Josh Brolin

text: Brolin was one of the actors who was considered for the role of Bruce Wayne / Batman in the DC Extended Universe, a deal which would have begun with Zack Snyder's "", but Ben Affleck was chosen for the role instead. The following year, it was announced that Brolin would play Thanos within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He portrays the character through motion capture performance, as well as voice acting. He cameoed as the character in "Guardians of the Galaxy" (2014) and "" (2015), and then reprised Thanos in a starring role in "" (2018) and 2019's "", which were filmed back-to-back.


title: Josh Brolin

text: In April 2017, Brolin signed a four-film contract with 20th Century Fox studios to portray the Marvel Comics character Nathan Summers / Cable in the "X-Men" film series. 2018's "Deadpool 2" is his first installment within that contract. He was set to reprise his role in Fox's planned "X-Force" movie until the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney.


title: Josh Brolin

text: In 2009, Brolin executive produced and performed in "The People Speak", a documentary feature film that uses dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries, and speeches of everyday Americans, based on historian Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States".


title: Josh Brolin

text: Brolin wrote and directed the short film "X" as his directorial debut. The film, about an inmate who escapes prison to reunite with his daughter and search for her murdered mother. It was the opening film at the first annual Union City International Film Festival in Union City, New Jersey in December 2010.