Study: Reddit users are twice as likely to be male than female

Reddit has gained more attention over the last few years as celebrities and high-profile political and business figures have hosted “Ask Me Anything” question-and-answer sessions, known as “AMAs,” on the site. President Obama was the first president to host an “AMA” on Reddit last August. The site crashed briefly because of all the traffic the Obama interview drew.

Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) have also used the site to help collect suggestions and feedback on draft legislation dealing with Internet issues.

The site and its users have been politically active on Internet policy matters. The social news website blacked out for a day last January to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, and its users used the site to vote up or down on ideas about how to defeat the anti-piracy bills.

Reddit will join with a string of other websites, including Mozilla and 4chan, on Thursday to launch an online protest against the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. The site is expected to post an anti-NSA spying message on its homepage on July 4th.

On the social news website, users can share and comment on ideas or links to stories on a range of topics, including politics and technology. Users vote up or down on the ideas or stories they like best, and the most popular ones bubble up to the top of the Web page.

Pew said this is the first standalone survey it has conducted on Reddit.

For the survey, Pew conducted telephone interviews with a sample of 2,252 adults over a roughly one-month period.