The Penn State subreddit is a growing online community that encourages users to post and discuss anything related to the university.
Reddit is an online media aggregation and discussion board where posts are organized into different user-created pages known as “subreddits.” The student-run Penn State page has over 21,000 users, and is still gaining more traction.
The site usually sees 600 to 700 interactions on the most popular posts in a month, according to Michael Cao, one of the subreddit’s moderators.
This community was originally created under the name r/PSU by Class of 2007 Penn State graduate David Rusenko. Rusenko is the founder and CEO of the web hosting service Weebly, which hosts over 30 million sites.
Shortly after its inception, Rusenko and his classmate, whose Reddit username is Huginn, scrapped r/PSU and replaced it with the current subreddit, r/PennStateUniversity, because of confusion with other universities that have the same “PSU” abbreviation.
Rusenko and Huginn’s goal was to establish a resource for students to share and discuss information relevant to other students. When the site was first started, the most common posts were articles from news and sports sites.
Although he is less active than he was when he was a student, Huginn is still on the team of students and alumni that moderates the site. Huginn believes the majority of moderators should be current students.
“I’m just there for moral support. It’s very student run,” Huginn said. “I’m a business consultant in real life.”
The site received a significant spike in traffic in November 2011, following the arrest of Jerry Sandusky, according to Huginn.
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As the site grew in popularity, the types of daily posts users make have diversified. One of the current moderators, Aviral Malhotra, noticed the topic of posts will often change based on current events.
“There are usually timeframes where something political happens, and there’s a week or two weeks of political debate on Reddit,” Malhotra (sophomore-finance) said.
Posts and comments discussing classes, current events and user creations are also common. As a result of the anonymity of Reddit, some students are willing to open up about personal matters.
Malhotra said talking with other students in the subreddit helps him learn different perspectives from students, as opposed to when he’s talking to friends or family.
The moderators are planning an “Ask Me Anything” online Q&A with a professor from the Eberly College of Science who is yet to be announced.
As students graduate, the moderator team’s goal is to make sure it always has several current students. Cao (junior-information sciences and technology) said he discovered the online community in July 2018.
Cao found the site when he was applying to colleges.
“I was unable to visit most of the colleges I applied to,” Cao said. “I looked to other avenues in order to gain more information and insight about the colleges that I was applying to. Naturally, that led me to different forums, and different subreddits.”
Cao became active in the Penn State subreddit when the moderator team reached out to him after noticing he had previous experience with managing social media and online communities of a large nonprofit organization.
The responsibilities of a Reddit moderator vary depending on the subreddit. According to Cao, the team’s daily operations are “not very formal,” and moderators are expected to check in for just a couple minutes each day.
Their primary obligations are to make sure there isn’t an excessive amount of reposts or anything breaking the rules, and to review reported posts, according to Cao. They are also responsible for keeping the subreddit “clean.”
“They take that time to review our queue of reported posts and submitted posts,” Cao said. “99% of the work is usually just keeping an eye on things, and cultivating an environment where we want people to be welcomed, and able to participate in our subreddit.”
