11
votes
Reddit custom logos nostalgia
Right now there's a little doodle for the reddit logo to congratulate UVA on winning the NCAA tournament last night and it really brought me back to the days when this was common. Fun times. Of course you can't see it from the redesign, fittingly.
You can see a catalog of every one there's been at r/logo.
This may be a weird thing to dwell on, but the decline of custom logos makes me think of the decline of reddit-wide memes and the sense of community in general.
I mean, I know a lot of the jokes were silly—like ice soap, Ameristralia, even the dreaded "narwhal bacons at midnight"—but the fact that they existed at all showed a level of camaraderie across reddit as a whole. That just doesn't happen anymore, or at least not nearly as much.
Same goes for the custom logos. It kind of humanized the site, or at least the admins, by essentially having reddit at least recognize something going on for no other reason than its own sake, or to do something fun for the users.
Maybe it's inevitable that the community wouldn't be as tight-knit as it grew larger and had a more diverse audience, but it's still nostalgic to look back on. I know there are subs with a much stronger sense of community, and a part of me thinks that if reddit was run differently it wouldn't be quite so fractured as it is now.
Went back to the oldest available link in the subreddit, the oldest three were broken Imgur links, sadly.