Reddit wars: What’s driving Singapore’s largest online communities

SINGAPORE – In January, a

cheating scandal involving an influencer and realtor

made the leap from private WhatsApp groups and into the public eye through one of Singapore’s most popular online forums.

Within days, the fallout had led to departures from leadership roles at real estate agencies PropertyLimBrothers and KW Singapore, as well as an exodus of over 100 property agents from the latter.

Such occurrences are now more commonplace as Reddit becomes Singapore’s de facto digital town square. It is where unfiltered discussions take place about everything from national service to organ donation. Its posts were also behind the viral spread of incidents such as the

artificial intelligence c

heating scandal at Nanyang Technological University (NTU)

in 2025.

To understand how Singapore’s Reddit users ferret out information and shape discussions, The Straits Times analysed user engagement patterns across 12 of Singapore’s most-frequented subreddits (which the platform calls its subforums) from 2021 to 2025.

These findings reveal that behind Reddit’s open architecture is a contested landscape, driven by often-invisible moderation policies and the dominance of a small group of prolific posters, resulting in discussion that centres on a narrow set of sources.

According to Dr Kokil Jaidka, associate professor at National University of Singapore’s (NUS) department of communications and new media, what results is an environment that “feels highly contentious and polarised to insiders” – yet most readers quietly sample multiple communities, using Reddit for information-gathering rather than identity-forming political participation.

Online gatekeepers

Among Singapore’s online spaces, r/singapore stands out as the largest in sheer volume. With over 1.8 million registered members and half a million weekly visitors, r/singapore dwarfs competitors like HardwareZone Forums (647,000 members) and Facebook groups such as SG Road Vigilante and Hawkers United – Dabao 2020 (both have around 330,000 members).

Yet, more than half (57 per cent) of the over 30,000 posts created by users on r/singapore in 2025 were deleted by the subreddit’s moderators. This was the highest rate of removal of the 12 local subreddits analysed.

Compared with 11 other similarly sized city- or country-focused subreddits elsewhere, including r/london and r/tokyo, this rate was exceeded only by r/losangeles and r/sydney.

What gives Reddit its distinctive vibe is both its decentralised structure (subreddits are run by volunteer moderators) and its core mechanic of user curation – posts that are upvoted by users rise to the top, while those downvoted sink into obscurity.

The platform itself bans certain kinds of content (such as hate speech), and one of the subreddits ST looked at, r/sgrabak, was banned for running afoul of these platform-wide rules. 

However, much of the day-to-day governance of a Reddit community comes down to its moderators, who have wide-ranging powers to remove posts and comments, ban users, and define the rules for participating in their community.

Some of these removals happen structurally and automatically. Users without any history of engagement with r/singapore through their comments have their posts automatically removed before others can see it.

In response to queries from ST, r/singapore’s moderators, who declined to be named, say the reasons for removing posts include spam and common questions, which are automatically directed to a daily thread or to r/asksingapore.

“As volunteers with our own day jobs, we turn to automated tools as much as is reasonable to avoid burnout while avoiding false positives,” they say in a written statement. “We note that many of the users banned for constantly posting hate speech move on to other alternative subreddits to continue doing so.”

Mr Soh Wee Yang, a PhD researcher at The University of Chicago who studies Reddit cultures, finds this rate of post removal unsurprising. Given r/singapore’s size and the rise of bot-driven posts on the platform, it makes sense that a large proportion of posts would be “self-promotional”, “not safe for work (NSFW)” or deemed irrelevant.

This has not stopped users from decamping and setting up their own community elsewhere.

Born from frustration

One such breakaway community is r/singaporeraw, created in 2019 in response to perceived censorship on r/singapore.

“There wasn’t one single explosive incident that triggered its creation,” an r/singaporeraw moderator, who goes by the username carlossanchas and declined to share his or her real name, tells ST. “It was more a gradual build-up of frustration among a segment of users who wanted a space with fewer content restrictions and less proactive moderation.”

With around 350,000 weekly visitors, it is Singapore’s third-largest subreddit in terms of reach.

In carlossanchas’ view, r/singapore’s moderation “locks the gates to new accounts or people without enough ‘karma’”. Karma is Reddit’s system of user points accumulated through receiving upvotes on your posts.

“To us, this silences a lot of people who need to be heard,” adds the moderator. “For example, if someone wants to whistleblow on a toxic workplace, or share a deeply personal story they don’t want linked to their main profile and they create a ‘throwaway’ account for privacy.”

Another example is r/sgexams, created in 2017 by an r/singapore moderator frustrated by the volume of exam-related discussions flooding the main forum. This effectively exiled discussions of student life to its own community, which has been run by successive generations of student volunteers since.

The move was unpopular at the time, with some of the subreddit’s earliest posts being complaints by users.

In a similar vein, r/asksingapore now exists primarily as a space for many of the questions that are deemed too trivial. “Best way to get around town as a tourist?” and “Help! interested in your accent” are among the subreddit’s earliest posts, dating back to 2015.

Is Reddit an echo chamber?

In r/singapore, the most upvoted post of 2025 was a screenshot of an Instagram user alleging that Member of Parliament Ng Chee Meng, then a People’s Action Party (PAP) candidate at Singapore’s general election that year, had been “unprofessional” while speaking to teachers during a dialogue, and calling on readers to “vote wisely”.

Two of the 10 most upvoted posts on the subreddit in 2025 were from users expressing their disappointment at the general election results, which saw a sizeable upswing in the PAP’s popular vote share.

Alongside this came dozens of users proclaiming that Reddit is an “echo chamber”, unrepresentative of the views of broader Singapore.  

So what is the true picture?

Across Singapore’s subreddits, according to ST’s findings, the number of users who created posts forms only a thin slice of their user base. 

In the three largest subreddits by volume of posts, r/asksingapore, r/sgexams and r/singapore, there were around 19,000, 18,500 and 16,000 post authors respectively for the whole of 2025, meaning that the vast majority of users – between 90 and 97 per cent of weekly visitors – do not ever create posts.

Among the 12 local subreddits analysed, the most prolific 10 per cent of users created between 32 per cent and 91 per cent of all non-deleted 2025 posts. For subreddits r/singaporehappenings, r/sgrabak and r/singaporeraw, this active subset of users made over half of all posts in 2025.

This dynamic is not unique to Reddit. The nature of online communication means that the bulk of attention nearly always flows towards a small minority of users, something that has existed since the early internet’s blogging era, says Dr Carol Soon, an associate professor with NUS’ department of communications and new media.

Another point that lends credence to those who subscribe to Reddit being an echo chamber: In r/singapore, posts in 2025 had a median upvote ratio of 0.92, meaning that 92 per cent of users voting on a post gave it an upvote instead of a downvote.

Removed posts are excluded from this analysis because they would create the misleading impression of an even higher upvote ratio (as other users are unable to downvote it).

Overall, r/singapore’s upvote ratio was the highest of all local subreddits analysed, tied with r/singaporeeats, a forum primarily used by its users to share food recommendations. Of the 11 comparably sized international subreddits analysed by ST, only one (r/manila) had a higher upvote ratio.

Moderators of r/singapore say the high upvote ratio is reflective of “the community self-policing the content they wish to see, and also of the overall online sentiment”.

“Posts and topics that get many upvotes tend to attract more of such posts in the future,” they say.

While the structure and history of Reddit lend itself to the creation of like-minded niche communities, with the site’s demographics elsewhere skewing young, male and more educated, this data indicates that r/singapore’s users have a relatively high degree of consensus over the content they want to see.

This is the experience of Ms Taara Kumar, a student assistant at NUS, who recalls to ST an instance when she was criticised by other users on r/singapore for a 2020 comment expressing her disapproval of misogynistic verses in Purple Light, a popular Singapore Armed Forces song.

That lyric, “kill the man, rape my girlfriend”, was banned by the Ministry of Defence in 2013.

Reddit users responded to her comment with backlash, stating that women do not go through or understand the things that men experience in the army.

“They were vocal in these spaces, but in real life, I didn’t really see it,” she says, noting that the fierce backlash led her to withdraw from the platform.

She adds that while many local Reddit communities have discussions that reflect the perspectives of a predominantly male demographic, an equivalent space does not appear to exist for women.

Anti-establishment, but not the way you think

For Dr Kokil, these results are not surprising. 

“Reddit here is less a gateway to new information ecosystems and more a reinterpretation layer,” she says. In these spaces, Reddit threads function as spaces where users can argue over mainstream news and dominant narratives.

Many Reddit users do not click through to the linked articles. A 2017 study by researchers from the University of Notre Dame in the US found that 73 per cent of users upvoted or downvoted a post before even viewing its content.

“The posts that are pro-establishment will not get upvotes. Why would they get upvotes? They’re already ‘winning’ in real life,” says Dr Kokil.

As with other social media platforms, contentiousness is key to attaining visibility through the algorithms that manage what users see. “They need to be contentious to succeed. So confusing contentiousness with public opinion can be a mistake,” she adds.

This contentiousness is key to understanding Reddit’s role in the lives of Singaporeans. The Institute of Policy Studies’ 2020 and 2025 surveys on media use during the general election – co-led by Dr Soon – finds that while Singaporeans are increasingly turning to discussion forums (including Reddit) for information, they rank these as the second-least trustworthy sources after podcasts.

“One of the common threads that came up is that forums provide them with access to what they feel is a less sanitised, less filtered news and commentary about life in Singapore,” says Dr Soon.

The limited offline avenues for people to air their grievances without consequence also plays a role, says Dr Kokil. This potentially explains why Singapore Reddit communities can at times seem complaint- and grievance-centric, as this is the informational niche that the platform is seen to be filling.

Mr Soh notes that venting and voyeurism are popular genres of content on the platform – in that users often use the platform to confess their concerns anonymously, and to collectively discuss instances where private life enters the public sphere.

“The amount of people texting on their phones while driving is insane,” writes one user in response to a video of a road accident shared on r/drivingsg, where such posts predominate. “Our traffic laws need to be much harsher.”

These posts about private confessions and public controversies are often seen as “an index of a larger political or social issue that needs to be addressed”, says Mr Soh. “That link is always implied. That implication is key for these posts to circulate.”

It is worth noting that the anti-establishment tone adopted by Singapore’s Reddit communities bears notable differences from its manifestations elsewhere, he adds.

In the US, Reddit’s largest user market, the platform is often seen as one of the bastions of centre-left discussion. These communities are anti-establishment in a variety of ways, ranging from criticising the current administration to agitating for broader change of the status quo.

In contrast, Singapore’s Reddit communities tend to be anti-establishment only in one dimension, seeing it as an outlet for one-off criticisms of the Government and its leadership. “It’s not generally anti-establishment as in anti-status quo,” Mr Soh says. “This is a really big difference that I must emphasise.”

Fire, national service and exams

This particular niche – accessing unfiltered discussions – explains both Reddit’s cultural impact and its limits. Many of its users turn to it for discussions on the personal, not the political.

Singapore’s largest online community dedicated to discussing personal finance topics, r/singaporefi, short for Singapore Financial Independence, is one of the central nodes of the local Financial Independence, Retire Early (Fire) movement.

When Reddit user Kyith (who declined to share his real name) first launched it in 2015, he did not expect it to grow to over 20,000 users in a matter of days. The community now receives more than 177,000 weekly visitors, making it Singapore Reddit’s fourth largest.

While its reach remains lower than that of many of Singapore’s financial content creators, what makes it distinct is how it enables discussions that do not emerge in other avenues where finance knowledge is shared. The community’s most upvoted posts of 2025 were from users sharing their Fire journeys, often with breakdowns of their investment portfolios.

“No inheritance, no windfall,” writes one user, sharing the result of 27 years of working life. “Just regular folks trying to make it.”

“What is surprising is how this generation will share their life and financial situation, and how others will share their situation to help others,” says Kyith. “You might not get someone able to share a potential perspective that is so particular to your own situation in a public setting in other ways.”

Similarly, some of the most-upvoted posts on r/singaporejobs were about dealing with wrongful dismissal and layoffs.

“I’m starting this because I want to help others navigate this process as I found it frustrating that there were no accounts or resources of the process anywhere,” writes one user about their experience with Singapore’s employment claims tribunal.

That Reddit has become synonymous with being the place for finding human answers has become increasingly relevant in a post-AI world. In 2024, Reddit inked partnerships with Google and OpenAI so that its user data can be used in these companies’ products.

The communities where Reddit’s influence runs deepest here might be NSmen and students, who flood r/nationalservicesg and r/sgexams with anxiety-filled posts around periods of enlistment and national exams respectively. 

Here, stressful and hyper-local encounters are experienced collectively, with users chiming in with advice and a listening ear, often centring on “megathreads” created by moderators for users to discuss important events.

“NS criticism, self-disclosure and emotional trauma stories, which would be politically sensitive in mainstream spaces, find a home in r/nationalservicesg,” says Dr Kokil. “This makes r/nationalservicesg a pressure-release valve where conscripts narrate system failures in detail under pseudonyms.”

While 2025’s AI cheating scandal at NTU was r/sgexams’ most visible entry into mainstream culture, the subreddit has a long history in shaping student opinion, often as a space where “controversial” views (such as students recommending against taking a particular course) and taboo experiences are shared.

In 2021, an anonymous post from a user alleging discrimination because of her transgender status was the inciting incident that led to a protest in front of the Ministry of Education’s headquarters that made global headlines.

“I would say what contributed to SGExams’ growth and evolution was that it filled a gap previously empty in the Singaporean youth context,” says Ms Emmeline Kao, a 20-year-old medical undergraduate who is one of r/sgexams’ moderators.

“Moderation is there to ensure there is a good balance between academic and non-academic content,” she adds. “Even if the latter is what users find more interesting and helps cement SGExams as an online youth space.”

For Mr Soh, that a subreddit focused on exams is one of the largest in Singapore says a lot about the country and what it values.

“There’s no other country that has something as peculiar as this,” he says.