Internet drama, nostalgia, and AI all captivated Australians this year, as the Reddit Recap 2023 shows what dominated online discussions. It may just be one part of the internet but it sure is a big one, with over 70 million people visiting Reddit each day.
For the second year running, r/amitheasshole, the Subreddit where people ask if they’re in the wrong, was the most popular community in Australia. It’s a wild little corner of the internet that had 57 million gossip fiends visit throughout 2023. Some of the stories featured there are outrageous.
Closer to home, r/australia, our national Subreddit followed behind in second place among Aussie Redditors. 13 million people visited the community, roughly equivalent to more than half of the country’s population. Considering how much many of us are struggling with the cost of living, it’s not surprising that the most popular post was about spiralling house prices.
On a lighter note, some of the most popular local Reddit posts ranged from a cheeky thong-stealing cockatoo to millennial nostalgia over ABC TV’s Good Game Spawn Point starring Bajo and Hex. It would be remiss to forget Australia’s collective excitement when Cortnee Vine sent the Matildas into the FIFA Women’s World Cup semi-final, a moment also enjoyed by almost an entire plane’s worth of people (and one person watching The Lord of the Rings).
Passengers at 30,000 feet watching Cortnee score the winner
byu/Red-Engineer inaustralia
Reddit Recap 2023: most-viewed communities in Australia
If Reddit was the only measure of popularity, neither footy nor cricket is our most popular sport: basketball, specifically the NBA, is. Based on the most-viewed Subreddits in Australia, AFL led the way over NRL, the latter of which failed to reach the top 10. Although r/cricket didn’t feature locally, it was India’s fifth most-viewed community.
- r/amitheasshole
- r/australia
- r/ausfinance
- r/askreddit
- r/melbourne
- r/nba
- r/sydney
- r/afl
- r/bestofredditorupdates
- r/mildlyinfuriating
The AI hype hit Reddit in a big way, too. r/ChatGPT racked up well over 3.5 million members just a year after the generative AI technology publicly launched. Gaming is another big topic on the aggregation site, with Baldur’s Gate 3 being the most popular video game-related community. Starfield wasn’t too far behind, cracking into Reddit’s top 50 communities for 2023.
Funnily enough, Reddit mentioned comedian John Oliver in its Recap 2023 announcement but not why he featured so prominently on the site. After a protest over prohibitively expensive APIs forcing popular third-party apps like Apollo to close, multiple popular Subreddits shared photos of Oliver en masse in an act of malicious compliance.
