Reddit’s frontpage: goodbye atheism and politics, hello gifs and earthporn

For a site that aims to be the front page of the internet, its own front page is kinda important. Which is why Reddit is working on a few changes — the first of which has been to remove some controversial subreddits in favour of more popular ones devoted to subjects like gifs, books, and um, earthporn.

Although Reddit users are able to customise the front page to show their favourite subreddits when they’re logged in, the ones on the front page often gain a lot of attention from new and casual users. The level of visibility may have been having a negative influence on the quality of subreddits like /r/politics and /r/atheism, and ultimately lead Reddit to switch them out in favour of subjects like books, television, earthporn and the always popular /r/gifs and /r/explainlikeimfive.

The Reddit team explained its decision in a blog post:

We know many of you will wonder what happened to /r/politics and /r/atheism and why they were removed from the default set. We could give you a canned corporate answer or a diplomatic answer that is carefully crafted for the situation. But since this is Reddit, we’re going to try things a bit differently and give you the real answer: they just weren’t up to snuff. Now, don’t get us wrong, there still ARE good parts about them. Overall, they just haven’t continued to grow and evolve like the other subreddits we’ve decided to add.

Of course, Redditors will still be able to contribute to the subreddits, but their posts will no longer be visible to as many people, which may help decrease the level of trolling and off-topic content in the streams. The changes to the front page may also help growing subreddits like /r/explainlikeimfive, Reddit main stay /r/gifs, as well as the strangely named /r/earthporn (which is filled with beautiful photos from around the planet).

They also mean that the page is now filled with a mix of news, science, technology as well as cute animals, movies and humourous content, which helps Reddit put its best side forward after recent controversies like the subreddits on the Boston bombers.