Is Reddit Good for Making Friends? What to Try Instead
Reddit gets recommended constantly as a place to meet people who share your interests, and it's easy to see why. There's a subreddit for almost anything you could care about, the discussions can be genuinely insightful, and browsing anonymously feels a lot lower pressure than posting on a platform where your real name and face are attached to everything you say. But if you've actually tried to turn a Reddit conversation into a friendship, you've probably noticed it doesn't quite work the way you hoped it would, and there's a reason for that which goes deeper than bad luck.
Reddit Wasn't Built to Hold Friendships
This is the part that surprises people when they hear it. Researchers who study Reddit's structure have actually described it as a social non-network, which sounds like a strange label for a site with hundreds of millions of users, but it makes sense once you understand how the platform is organized. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, Reddit has no concept of a friend list, no persistent connection between two accounts, and no feature that keeps a conversation alive after the thread it started in goes quiet. One academic study that tracked reply behavior across the platform found that more than 99.9 percent of comments were replies to someone the user had never replied to before, which means the overwhelming majority of interactions on Reddit are one-off exchanges rather than the start of an ongoing relationship. You're not failing at making friends on Reddit because you're doing something wrong. You're running into a structural limitation that the platform was never designed to solve.
Compare that to how friendship actually forms. Research out of the University of Kansas, led by communication professor Jeffrey Hall, found that it takes roughly 50 hours of time together before two people become casual friends, closer to 90 hours before they'd call each other real friends, and over 200 hours before that relationship becomes close. That's not 200 hours of scrolling past each other's usernames. It's 200 hours of actual back and forth, the kind of repeated, low stakes interaction that slowly builds familiarity and trust. Reddit's format, where a thread lives for a few days and then disappears under the weight of newer posts, makes accumulating that kind of time with the same specific person almost impossible unless you both go out of your way to keep finding each other, which most people simply don't do.
The Public Nature of Reddit Works Against Real Talk
There's also the matter of audience. Every comment you post on Reddit sits underneath a public thread that anyone can read, screenshot, upvote, or pile onto with their own opinion. That's a fine setup for asking which lawnmower to buy or debating a TV show finale, but it creates a strange kind of pressure when you're trying to have a more personal conversation. Nobody wants to open up about a rough week, a career doubt, or something they're genuinely unsure about while knowing thousands of strangers might read it and weigh in, and that awareness tends to keep conversations shallower than they'd otherwise be. Even Reddit's own upvote and downvote system, which is supposed to surface the best content, has been shown in research to be a fairly unreliable measure of quality, since a large share of users vote on posts without actually reading them first. That's a small detail, but it points to a bigger truth about the platform: it's optimized for content that performs well with a crowd, not conversation that deepens between two specific people.
This isn't really Reddit's fault. It was built as a discussion and news aggregation site, and for that purpose it does its job well. The problem only shows up when you try to use it for something it wasn't designed for, which is building the kind of ongoing, familiar relationship that makes someone feel like an actual friend rather than a username you agreed with once.
Why So Many People Are Feeling This Gap Right Now
If this all feels a bit more urgent than it would have ten years ago, that's not a coincidence. Research from the Survey Center on American Life has tracked what's now commonly called the friendship recession, and the numbers are hard to ignore. Back in 1990, only 3 percent of American adults said they had no close friends at all. By 2024, that figure had climbed to around 17 percent, close to one in six adults with nobody they'd count as a close friend. Time spent with friends has fallen sharply too, dropping by roughly a third between the early 2010s and 2023. Men in particular have felt this shift, with the share reporting zero close friends jumping from 3 percent in 1990 to 15 percent by 2021. Loneliness researchers have also pointed out that weak social connection carries health risks comparable to smoking, which is part of why the U.S. Surgeon General formally labeled loneliness a public health epidemic in 2023.
None of that is meant to be alarming for its own sake. It's just useful context for why so many people end up on Reddit searching for connection in the first place, and why it can feel disheartening when the platform doesn't quite deliver on that hope. People aren't imagining the gap. It's real, it's measurable, and it's a big part of why alternatives built specifically around ongoing conversation have started to matter more. If you want a closer look at why this hits so many people once they're past their twenties, why adults struggle to make friends after 30 covers that in more depth.
What Actually Helps Friendships Form Online
If Reddit's biggest weakness is that it resets every conversation and puts everything on public display, then the fix is almost the exact opposite: smaller spaces, the same people showing up repeatedly, and enough privacy that people feel comfortable being a little more honest. This is essentially the whole idea behind Moopes. Instead of one enormous public feed, you're placed into small group chat rooms that hold somewhere between 2 and 12 people, which is a small enough number that everyone's messages actually get seen and responded to, but still big enough that conversation doesn't rely entirely on one other person showing up.
Moopes is 100% text only, which removes a surprising amount of friction. There's no camera, no pressure to be presentable, and no need to carve out a block of uninterrupted time the way a video call demands. You can read a message on a break at work and reply properly that evening, and the room will still be there, holding the conversation exactly where you left it. You can still share an image when it helps the conversation along, a photo, a screenshot, whatever fits, so it's not stripped of context, just stripped of the pressure that comes with being on camera. That persistence is the piece Reddit structurally can't offer. A Moopes room doesn't disappear under newer posts after a few days. It just keeps going, which is exactly the kind of repeated, low pressure contact that research suggests is what actually turns strangers into friends over time.
Rooms are also organized around topics rather than an algorithmic feed trying to guess what will keep you scrolling. You join a room because the subject genuinely interests you, and the people in it are there for the same reason, which gives every conversation a natural starting point instead of the cold, blank feeling of trying to strike up a chat with a random stranger. This is a big part of why smaller rooms create better conversations than large, open feeds ever really can.
Give Moopes a Try
If Reddit has left you with interesting conversations but no actual friends to show for it, the missing piece probably isn't effort on your part. It's the format. A small, persistent, text-first room where the same handful of people keep showing up gives friendship an actual chance to build the way it naturally does, through repetition and familiarity rather than one good comment that never gets a second reply. Moopes was built around exactly that idea, and it might be worth a look if you're ready for something a bit more consistent than the next thread scrolling past.
Author
Jamie Ellison writes about online friendships, digital communities, and why some platforms turn strangers into friends while others just leave you scrolling past usernames. Their work often looks at why smaller, more consistent conversations tend to build stronger connections than big public feeds like Reddit ever really can.
FAQ
Is Reddit good for making friends?
Not really. It's built for discussion, not ongoing relationships. Threads are temporary and public, with no way to keep talking to the same person afterward, so most connections end where the thread does.
Why is it hard to make friends on Reddit?
Most Reddit replies go to strangers you've never interacted with before, and the public nature of every post makes deeper, more personal conversation hard to have. There's also no built-in way to keep a specific person's conversation going once the post moves on.
How long does it actually take to make a friend?
University of Kansas research found it takes roughly 50 hours to become casual friends, 90 hours for real friends, and over 200 hours for a close friendship. That kind of accumulated time is hard to build on Reddit, where most exchanges are brief and never repeat with the same person.
What's a good alternative to Reddit for making friends?
Small group text chat apps like Moopes. Persistent, topic-based rooms with 2 to 12 people let the same group keep talking over time, which gives friendship the repeated contact it actually needs to form.
Does Moopes have video chat?
No. Moopes is 100% text only. You can still upload images when it helps the conversation, but there's no camera, no video, and no pressure to be on screen.
Why are so many people struggling to make friends right now?
The share of American adults with no close friends rose from 3 percent in 1990 to around 17 percent by 2024, according to the Survey Center on American Life. Less time spent together and fewer everyday spaces for repeated contact are a big part of why.