Forocoches, Menéame and the language: why Reddit, the great US forum, has not succeeded in Spanish

The social network Reddit went public on March 21 and, for now, its figures are a success. Reddit is consistently one of the top 10 traffic pages in the US, where it has 131 million weekly users, according to company data. In Spain, on the other hand, it is a long way from YouTube, Instagram or even LinkedIn in Google searches over the years. There are several possible explanations for this difference. But above all it is due to the distance between English and the rest of the languages: there are almost the same weekly users worldwide (136 million) as in the US. It is an Anglocentric community.

Reddit is a social network organized into topic forums and based on anonymity. Users gather in more than one hundred thousand communities as disparate and specific as traveling alone, memes, diabetes or hatred of cars. The moderation of each community is done by volunteers and they create a space where real humans resolve doubts or share concerns. In many Google searches, the most reliable results are often in a Reddit thread. In Spain, the largest community is r/Spain, which is primarily in Spanish, with 657,000 subscribers and which has grown 97% in subscribers in the last year, according to the company. The next two are r/lmdshow and r/ubius, of which streamers Illojuan and Rubius. The company says that humor and video games are the most popular areas in Spain. In Spanish, the largest communities are r/Mexico, r/Argentina and r/fútbol, ​​which has grown 156% in the last 12 months.

With its entry into the stock market, Reddit sees an obvious opportunity for growth: “During the last three months of 2023, approximately 50% of redditors [usuarios de Reddit] They visited the platform from outside the United States. “More than 90% of all Reddit posts were made in English,” the company says in documentation prior to its listing. That distance between English and non-American users is room for growth. The Spanish market is one of their objectives because they have seen organic growth, the company explains to EL PAÍS, although they do not share total user data. Reddit has three open positions on LinkedIn for Spain: growth, content and community managers. It has another 15 positions for Europe although, except for Italy, the majority are technical positions for its headquarters in Dublin and Amsterdam.

Despite all this recent development, Reddit was founded in 2005: a year after Facebook, the same year as YouTube, and a year before Twitter. It has had plenty of time to conquer international markets, like its competitors. Why has it not been done in the Spanish case? These are some of the causes.

1. Forocoches and Menéame: Spain already had its forums

Forocoches is the largest forum in Spanish in the world. It was born in 2003, two years before Reddit. Its founder, Álex Marín Ilitersand Edu, who wears marketing and business, they believe that habit is key to their success: “Spain is very customary and Forocoches in the end is not just a community, but a bit the internet bar in Spain, so no matter how much a new bar comes to the neighborhood, in the end the old bar is the one that will continue to succeed because it is the one that understands the country, the one that is embedded in the culture. In addition, we are already full of social networks, American and Chinese, which makes the forum feel even more from here”, they say.

Although there are many differences, the Spanish internet user who seeks advice and opinions from other people already finds that in Forocoches. Its users and communities are less diverse than those of Reddit and there is hardly any moderation, but it covers part of that space: “My hypothesis is that Forocoches performs the function of Reddit in Spanish,” says Clara Juárez, a researcher at the University of Vienna. “It is true that there are messages with intolerant content, but there are also many that are not. It also performs that consulting function. In my research I found that the participants of Reddit and Forocoches, despite the trolls, see in both a similar feeling of community and support,” she adds.

Precisely in 2005, Menéame emerged in Spain. It is a platform that allows you to vote for articles. Reddit also has that function: each post receives votes and those with the most are arranged on another page that Reddit called “the front page of the internet.” That’s what Menéame specifically did, according to Ricardo Galli, its founder: “When I released Menéame in December 2005, Digg [una plataforma de EE UU que se centraba en votaciones] it was more popular and no one knew about Reddit. But many things below Meneáme were more similar to Reddit. There are many things that I implemented in Menéame that were from Reddit,” he acknowledges.

Forocoches, Menéame and other forums like Cotilleando occupied a space that Reddit did not intend to conquer outside the United States in those years. And then Twitter arrived: “Our competition and fear then was Twitter,” Galli recalls.

These similarities have one big exception on Reddit: the moderators. In addition to the platform’s content policy team, Reddit has thousands of volunteers who encourage conversation and control what and how it is talked about in each subreddit or community. That makes it a different project, although it has obviously also had toxic communities with permissive moderators. Reddit has had its share of controversial cases involving Nazis or stalkers and the company has had to intervene.

Even so, it is a different page: “Reddit is a very different community from spaces like Forocoches, Meneáme or Twitter,” says Natalia, who has moderated several important communities in Spanish for a decade. “Those of us who moderate do so for personal motivations. We want a better moderated space, free of discrimination and without misinformation. No other platform moderates well, because they want to maximize traffic. Decency is prioritized here. If you want an echo chamber, go to Twitter. If you want toxicity and misinformation, visit Forocoches or Burbuja(.)info. We don’t tolerate those things here,” she says.

2. Everything is in English

If someone happened to stumble on Reddit, everything was in English. It was another big problem. “Reddit has always had a big obstacle due to language. Before, only Spaniards who knew English participated,” says Natalia.

At the end of 2023, Reddit announced that its recommendation system for new communities to subscribe to would be based on the user’s location and local trends: Bollywood and cricket in India, the Champions League in Germany and the Paris Masters in France. Before it was global and English predominated.

The problem was not only the language, but also the cultural focus: “The nature of Reddit was much more editorial and less social than other large networks,” says Antonio Ortiz, technology analyst at Error500. “You came to Reddit and the content agenda was very Anglo,” he adds.

Natalia highlights that the moderators are trying to “recover” communities for locals, like the citizens of a tourist city who recover a square for their use and kick out the tourists: “Communities that do not allow content in English grow a lot. I moderate r/Barcelona, ​​where we decided to send tourist content to ar/AskBarcelona to recover the community for local content. Until recently it was a community mainly for expatriates, but participation in Spanish and Catalan has grown. Or r/Tenerife was for guiris and now it is a unique site with memes from residents and conversations that do not exist anywhere else,” says Natalia.

3. The company had not done its best

In 2014, Podemos’ famous sectoral and geographic circles were organized on Reddit, in something called Plaza Podemos. It was a different project, but it didn’t take off and the company wasn’t very interested either: “At the time it was used because there was no other software that allowed this type of open and decentralized participation in such a simple way,” recalls Miguel Arana, today a professor at Cranfield University (United Kingdom) and then involved in this task at Podemos. “It was a quincemayista phase, with many people giving their opinions. Although these tools were centralized for something pragmatic,” explains Julián Macías, who was later in charge of networks at Podemos.

Reddit made more concrete attempts to land in Europe. Ortiz remembers meetings with people from the platform about three years ago: “They were contacting European media groups because they were going to launch versions in Europe and they wanted to have their support: a comment system integrated with Reddit or integrating share buttons on Reddit and they paid you something. It was very exploratory and just as it came it left. I heard echoes that they saw that Europe was very complicated, each country with its language, with its legislation apart from the European framework,” says Ortiz. And since then, little more. Now the company seems to be trying again.

4. Your own rules make it complicated

Reddit has its own tone, routines, jokes and trivia. It happens on all networks, but posting a photo or tweet for everyone to see is easier than finding a community and saying something specific.

“Reddit requires specific skills,” warns Ariadna Matamoros, a professor at Australia’s Queensland University of Technology. “There is its own culture with implicit rules, and you look like a bit of a idiot if you are not aware of the platform’s rules. This is also a barrier,” she adds.

Thus, while other indigenous forums already covered that need and in Spanish, there was not much need to take the risk. Now Reddit hopes to gain space.