I dislike trying to talk about "The Reddit Community" for the same reason I'd dislike trying to talk about "The New York City Community" or "The Tokyo Community": You don't have a million-member community. You can talk about Dunbar's Number, you can talk about the simple fact nobody goes out and meets a million people even if they're all on the same website/within a half-mile radius of their home, but the result is the same.
It's possible to talk about "The Average Redditor" or "The Average New Yorker" or "The Average Tokyo Resident", because statistics isn't about community, but the whole reason Reddit has survived at the size it is is precisely because subreddits allow different people to have vastly different views of "what's on Reddit" based on subscription/unsubscription. This allows The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam and dozens of other communities which would fight like cats in a sack were they ever mixed to share the same service.
So Reddit isn't a community. It's a pre-made hosted platform to build a community meeting point that you can largely (or completely, via invitation-only private subreddits) insulate from all the other communities on the same platform.
It's possible to talk about "The Average Redditor" or "The Average New Yorker" or "The Average Tokyo Resident", because statistics isn't about community, but the whole reason Reddit has survived at the size it is is precisely because subreddits allow different people to have vastly different views of "what's on Reddit" based on subscription/unsubscription. This allows The_Donald and EnoughTrumpSpam and dozens of other communities which would fight like cats in a sack were they ever mixed to share the same service.
So Reddit isn't a community. It's a pre-made hosted platform to build a community meeting point that you can largely (or completely, via invitation-only private subreddits) insulate from all the other communities on the same platform.