For years, Reddit felt like the dark alley of the internet. A place where tech bros, incels and unmoderated chaos thrived. Certainly not the digital hangout for the women I knew. But something’s changed. At a friend’s wedding just two months ago, after countless texts about rosacea flare-ups and dermatology dead-ends, her skin looked calmer than it had in a year. I asked what miracle she’d found. “Reddit,” she said.

Her confession chimed with a dozen other conversations I’ve had this year. Colleagues, cousins, friends-of-friends, who lower their voices and say: “Have you checked Reddit?” whenever one of us has a gynaecological problem to solve, a financial challenge to navigate or a travel tip to find. The numbers confirm the whispers: according to Pew research, Reddit usage has skyrocketed since 2019, with this growth largely driven by female users (who are, at the same time, leaving X in droves).

“I was nervous to post, but once I did, I got a lot of really interesting and different responses,” 26-year-old Caroline tells me. She turned to the platform for advice about her skin concerns after her dermatologist kept recommending “short-term fixes” instead of tackling the problem at the root. “I knew from my own research that histamines and gut health could impact rosacea,” she explains. “Reddit became like a support group that helped me learn things I hadn’t come across myself.” Her experience was overwhelmingly positive; now, she’s a Reddit regular. “People were really encouraging [...] it made me start commenting on other threads.” 

Reddit fills a hole left by Quora and Tumblr – a space for genuinely useful information and for likeminded people to nerd out together

Caroline is not alone in turning to the platform for health advice. In the face of a gender health gap which currently amounts to 75 million years of life lost annually, and gynaecological waiting lists which have doubled since 2020, 81 per cent of women say they feel less alone on their health journey because of Reddit. Communities like r/endometriosis (up 79 per cent year-on-year) and r/pregnancyUK (up 214 per cent) are booming – a stark reflection of just how much women’s trust in health services has been eroded. 

26-year-old El has had a similarly positive experience using Reddit. “I always thought Reddit wasn’t for me. It seemed like a big gossip section; one which looked pretty negative from the outside,” she says. “But it’s helped me massively, from interview tips to getting support with my agoraphobia [...] I’ve been in crisis and called hotlines that make you leave a voicemail. In times of need, Reddit is the middle ground of human connection that doesn’t feel like an AI response.”

Women’s growing interest in Reddit isn’t happening in a vacuum, says Dr Ysabel Gerrard, Senior Lecturer in Digital Communication at the University of Sheffield. It reflects a broader exhaustion in the commercial internet itself. “A big driver of the shift to Reddit is the deterioration of Google as a search engine and the dominance of sponsored posts,” she says. “People now add ‘Reddit’ to the end of their search in order to find better answers. It’s evidence of a deep frustration and distrust.”

She’s right. Across social media, our feeds are increasingly full of ads, AI-generated content and polarised politics. Nowhere is this more glaring than on X, a platform which, for the first time ever, now has a more extreme male-female ratio than Reddit, making it the most gender-skewed major social media platform.

El cites Elon Musk’s takeover as the moment she stepped back, and she’s not alone. Women have been leaving X since Musk’s mass firing of X’s content moderation team in 2023 and the subsequent removal of the “nudge” button – a feature which had cut trolling by 60 per cent. Since then, misinformation and harassment have surged, with investigations showing that X’s algorithm routinely prioritises extreme content, whilst Musk’s chatbot Grok has faced criticism for producing antisemitic responses.

For many women, like 26-year-old Saskia, it amounts to a platform that feels volatile and increasingly unhelpful. “I don’t use X anymore, and for me, Reddit fills a hole left by Quora and Tumblr – a space for genuinely useful information and for like-minded people to nerd out together. It’s kind of like what people use ChatGPT for, except with actual human beings.”

Another big part of Reddit’s appeal lies in the relative anonymity it affords its users. Where TikTok and Instagram demand visibility and punish you for not performing, Reddit encourages you to just exist, to learn, and to ask things without fear of humiliation – a tonic to the usual culture of surveillance on social media. “There’s no pressure to post or answer,” says Caroline, who doesn’t use any other form of social media.

I don’t find it anywhere near as addictive as X, Bluesky, Instagram or TikTok

For Saskia, the anonymity enables greater self-expression: fandoms, niche costume IDs on the Buffy subreddit, and an “incredibly nerdy” (her words) devotion to Stardew Valley. “The community is so helpful and fun,” she says. She adds that the unvarnished, anti-aesthetic nature of Reddit means she’s not tempted to scroll. “I don’t find it anywhere near as addictive as X, Bluesky, Instagram or TikTok. I just go on it when I need a question answered or for information from a particular community.”

Dr Gerrard points out that this resistance to overconsumption comes from a fundamental difference in Reddit’s architecture. “TikTok and Instagram aren’t places where you congregate around a community and get answers to your questions,” she says. “You’re a slave to the algorithm. Reddit frees you from that.” 

Of course, Reddit isn’t a hate-free utopia. Misogynistic subreddits still exist – r/passportbros has over 100,000 followers, and r/incels had 40,000 before its 2017 ban. But unlike TikTok, where harmful content can appear in the space of just two clicks (as Global Witness found in 2025), Reddit’s lack of algorithm means you generally see what you seek out. As El puts it: “you choose to stay away from the negative spaces.”

Dr Gerrard agrees that safety on Reddit is complicated and community-specific. Each subreddit is its own micro-society, run by human moderators. Women’s safety “depends on what they need to be kept safe from, and which community they’re in,” she says. But within those micro-societies, women are building something: spaces where they can gather, share, learn, warn, champion, soothe and support, without needing to be visible, polished or monetisable.