On March 4, a Trump appointee at the Department of Veterans Affairs circulated a memo to senior leadership. The agency would “move out aggressively” to improve efficiency, with an “initial objective” of cutting the work force to 2019 levels.
The next morning, someone posted a copy of this “reduction in force” memo to a Reddit group called VeteransAffairs, an online community of 19,000 members. The copy was difficult to follow, a sequence of photos taken of the memo on a screen, but the message was clear enough: Some 80,000 jobs would be cut.
Questions and comments poured in, some bewildered, some frantic. The agency had half a million employees at hospitals, clinics, call lines and regional benefit offices that served veterans across the country. Who would be fired? Was this the end of the V.A.’s medical research? How would this affect wait times for medical appointments?
No one had solid answers, just informed speculation. Livelihoods and veterans’ well-being were at stake, so the vibe was somber. But there was still room for dark humor.
“We gotta pay for Greenland somehow,” one person joked.
Reddit, a bare-bones social media site organized around more than 100,000 niche communities called subreddits, has long catered to people with quirky shared interests, whether Bitcoin, fly-fishing or photos of Keanu Reeves being awesome. It is unlike other social media platforms. Instagram and TikTok offer videos and influencers; Reddit is text-heavy and aggressively unsuited to building star power. Facebook and LinkedIn require real names; anonymity reigns on Reddit, minimizing egos and consequences.
The Atlantic recently deemed Reddit possibly “the best platform on a junky web.” As other social media sites have fallen prey to A.I. slop and incessant pleas to “like and subscribe,” Reddit has become one of the last places on the internet with authentically human information, community and advice.
For government workers, it has been a lifeline in recent months. With the Trump administration’s rapid downsizing of the federal bureaucracy, subreddits where government workers previously posted the occasional tale about a Zoom meeting mishap or health plan question have become crowded forums for fears, anxieties and tidbits of intra-agency observation. On one subreddit, FedNews, government employees have been relaying updates about layoffs, a new $1 limit on government credit cards and “what did you accomplish last week” emails. It has drawn an influx of millions of visitors since January, according to internal statistics shared by the subreddit’s creator.
“These individual subreddits let people find niches that work really well for them,” said Sarah Gilbert, a researcher at Cornell University who focuses on online communities. “That’s happening on FedNews, where people are using that space to come together and talk to other people who are experiencing similar trauma.”
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