Reddit’s NSFW Subreddits Got Hornier During COvID

Reddit has long been considered “the front page of the internet” due to the way it captures online conversations and reflects the thoughts, feelings and emotions of the web as a whole.

This also explains why the NSFW subreddit is one of the most popular on the platform. The Internet has been and will forever be excited. Reddit is just the epitome of that.

And, according to a new study, Reddit became even more horny during the COVID-19 pandemic.

that’s the discovery paper A study by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the University of Toronto explored how Reddit changed between the world lockdown and the social distancing measures that followed. .

“When the pandemic hit, all major sites reported increased usage,” says Beniamin Veselowski of EPFL Lausanne. “A year after the pandemic hit, we noticed things were changing with users starting to decline on Netflix and Facebook. I began to wonder if I could do research on

Researchers had access to all comments and posts made on Reddit between December 2005 and June 2022.

The massive data included 13 billion comments from 89 million users. Within the data, they explored how activity changed from February 2020 to June 2022 compared to average activity (and Reddit’s growth) prior to February 2020.

They categorized the changes into two areas. One is structural changes such as new users and increased activity, and the other is how long users have been on the platform. Content, that is, what makes up the platform.

One of their most striking findings was that NSFW community activity across Reddit has doubled since the beginning of the pandemic.

“It was one of the most surprising discoveries for me,” says Veselowski. Before the pandemic, the NSFW subreddit accounted for his 6.7% of all activity on Reddit. By the end of the pandemic, it accounted for 13% of his overall activity as measured by comments, suggesting that people were engaging with his content in porn. “I think we can draw a lot of conclusions as to why it happened,” he says. “Many of us are at home, more of us are lonely, more of us are looking for something… well, yeah.”

During the same period, activity declined in several typically popular subreddits focused on animals, memes, and video games like Minecraft.

More generally across platforms, most subreddits saw an initial spike in activity as the pandemic forced everyone home, away from work, and seeking distraction. But unlike other subreddit themes, the NSFW subreddit maintained its early momentum, although it had an early spike during the COVID-19 outbreak and quickly returned to its previous growth trajectory.

“Things like hobbies, politics, advice, and even dating life subreddits, we’re seeing an initial surge early in the COVID-19 pandemic, but two years later, we’re back on our previous growth trajectory. I’ll be back,” Veselovsky says. “We’ve actually seen a continual increase in activity in his NSFW content on Reddit and porn content in general, which we found quite surprising.”

The NSFW subreddit has a wide range of adult content, from user-generated posts to professionally curated content from leading adult film studios.

“As a researcher, I wish I could come up with a big theory as to why this is, but the goal of this analysis is to clarify what has changed on the platform, rather than delve into the hard question of why it changed. That’s it,” says Veselovsky.

Some try to speculate why NSFW content thrived on engagement during the pandemic and ensuing lockdown. “The pandemic has given some people more free time, especially the less caring,” says Elissa Redmiles, a faculty member at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. “It has also reduced face-to-face connections and opportunities for sexual expression, as well as the ability to form one-on-one connections, for example to share intimate content. It may have contributed to an increase in the amount of images shared.”

At the same time, NSFW content has become more mainstream with the rise of OnlyFans and the adoption of NSFW content by celebrities like Bella Thorne. Redmiles and her colleagues investigated a similar increase The rise of new sexual content creators on OnlyFans during the pandemic is because the platform has given them the opportunity to make money at a time when it’s hard to get a job.

Still, Redmiles points out that the rise in human libido is only partially welcome.

“The increase in sexual expression is great, and if this is one example, the reduction in prejudice is great, but there is a dark side to this as well. New populations are experiencing more sextortion, according to research documents during a pandemic. “