Reddit has long been deemed “the front page of the internet” because of the way that it captures the online conversation and reflects the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the wider web.
That also explains why NSFW subreddits are among some of the most popular on the platform. The internet has been and always will be perpetually horny. Reddit is just a microcosm of that.
And new research shows that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Reddit became even hornier.
That’s the finding of a paper by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the University of Toronto, which looked at how Reddit changed during the lockdowns and subsequent social distancing the world embarked upon.
“When the pandemic broke out, every major site was reporting increases in usage,” says Veniamin Veselovsky of EPFL Lausanne. “After a year into the pandemic, we noticed with Netflix and Facebook these users were beginning to drop and the landscape was changing. We began to wonder if we could rigorously study the changes the platform when through during the pandemic.”
The researchers had access to every single comment and submission ever made on Reddit between December 2005 and June 2022.
The massive data included 13 billion comments from 89 million users. Within the data, they studied how activity changed from February 2020 to June 2022, as compared to average activity (and growth of Reddit) prior to February 2020.
They broke down the changes into two areas: structural changes, such as new users and more activity, and the time period users stayed on the platform; and content, or the substance of what the platform is made up of.
Among their most pronounced discoveries was that activity in NSFW communities across Reddit doubled from the beginning of the pandemic.
“That was one of my surprising findings,” says Veselovsky. Prior to the pandemic, NSFW subreddits accounted for 6.7% of all activity on Reddit. By the end of the pandemic, it accounted for 13% of all activity as measured by comments, suggesting folks were engaging with pornographic content. “I think there’s a lot of conclusions you can draw about why that happened,” he says. “More of us are at home, more of us are lonely, more of us are looking to… yeah, you know.”
Over the same time period, a handful of usually popular subreddits focusing on animals, memes, and Minecraft-like video games saw a drop in activity.
More generally across the platform, most subreddits saw an initial spike in activity as the pandemic pushed everyone home, away from work, and seeking diversions. But unlike other subreddit themes, where there was an initial spike at the onset of COVID-19 and a quick return to previous growth trajectories, NSFW subreddits sustained that early momentum.
“With some of these other things like hobbies and politics, advice, and even dating life subreddits, we see an initial spike at the outset of at the onset of COVID, but then after two years they go back to their previous growth trajectory,” says Veselovsky. “The NSFW content and porn content more generally on Reddit really has a sustained increase in activity, which we found quite surprising.”
NSFW subreddits are home to a range of adult content, from user-generated posts to those aggregating professionally-made content from large adult movie studios.
“Being a researcher, I wish I could propose some big theory as to why this is, but the purpose of this analysis is to highlight what changed on the platform rather than getting into the thorny questions of why it changed,” says Veselovsky.
Others are more willing to chance a guess as to why NSFW content flourished in engagement during the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. “The pandemic increased free time for some people, particularly for those without caring responsibilities,” says Elissa Redmiles, a faculty member at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany. “It also reduced opportunities for in-person connection and sexual expression and thus the ability to make, for instance, one-to-one connections through which to share intimate content. Both of these factors may have contributed to a rise in the volume of intimate image sharing during the pandemic.”
At the same time, NSFW content became more mainstream with the rise of OnlyFans and the adoption of it by celebrities like Bella Thorne. Redmiles and her colleagues have researched a similar increase in the rise of new sexual content creators on OnlyFans during the pandemic, as the platform gave them the opportunity to make money at a time when work was hard to come by.
Still, Redmiles points out that our increased libido is only partially welcomed.
“While increased sexual expression is wonderful, and lessened stigma—if this is an example of that—is marvelous, there's also a dark side to this as research documents new groups experiencing more sextortion during the pandemic.”
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