How Reddit has attracted a tight-knit golf community of nearly 1 million members

Ask a question, any golf-related question.

Are rain gloves worth it?

What is the difference between the PGA Tour and LIV?

Why are old people good at chipping?

How should you deal with a slow playing partner?

Who is Talor Gooch?

Such are the queries posted on a popular digital platform where no aspect of the game is too minute or monumental to be (take your pick) discussed, debated, disputed, dissected in the granular detail of a slo-mo swing analysis, which are welcome in the forum, too. So are golf-themed jokes and memes, tournament recaps, ruminations on rules kerfuffles, course recommendations, equipment reviews. Got a hot take on a random topic?  Ex: If you keep a club you found on the course instead of turning it in, you’re the worst kind of person. Please, have at it. Or maybe you’re keen to share a picture of your putter, or a hole-in-one story, or a reminiscence of a childhood round played with your grandpa. 

On r/golf, (almost) anything goes.

The “r” in r/golf stands for Reddit, which — for those who still communicate by carrier pigeon — is a no-frills, user-curated news and social network that ranks among the world’s most visited websites, valued at roughly $6.5 billion, based on the company’s recent IPO. Within the Reddit ecosystem are more than 100,000 online communities, or subreddits, where more than 267 million active weekly users account for some 73 million posts a day, on message boards devoted to subjects as wide-ranging as the internet itself.

While most golf subreddits indulge niche obsessions — simulators, carts, swing tips, course design — r/golf is overarching, a catch-all for the game. It’s also the largest and, over the past year, fastest-growing golf community on Reddit (and in the top 700 largest subreddits of any kind, placing it in the top 1 percent in size for the entire site), with nearly a million subscribers, or Redditors, a number that swelled during the pandemic and hasn’t stopped, jumping some 60 percent in the last 18 months.

What’s the appeal?

That question, too, has been posed on Reddit.

Among the pithier replies: “Reddit is social media for people who hate social media.”

Not that it’s free of nonsense, bile or misinformation. There’s plenty of that. Since 2005, when Reddit was launched by a pair of graduates of the University of Virginia, some very vile subreddits have been shut down, and many dark corners on the site persist.

And yet Reddit is different from other platforms.  For starters, the hyper-specificity of its threads tends to elicit passion over poison. Each subreddit also has explicit codes of conduct and volunteer moderators, or mods, who help uphold them. As a further safeguard, the communities themselves serve as gatekeepers by ‘upvoting’ and ‘downvoting’ posts, which either elevates or buries them on the page. In this way, the same egregious message that might go viral elsewhere is driven down and out of sight on Reddit, where the sniping rarely rises beyond the level of snark. Compared to the mouth-breathing animosity that often consumes X, even the testiest exchanges on Reddit can seem almost quaint in their civility and literary in their sophistication. And because networking and marketing are largely frowned upon, there is little of the air-brushed shilling and self-promotion that pervade Tik-Tok and Instagram.

“It’s not just people shouting at each other or selling something or saying the same thing over and over,” says an r/golf moderator who posts as u/GreenWaveGolfer12. “It can actually feel like you’re having a conversation.”

Who you might be chatting with is another matter. Anonymity is par for the course on r/golf. It is, in fact, the default setting across all of Reddit, though the aim of going nameless, Redditors say, is not to provide cover for cowards; it’s to protect individual privacy while keeping the focus on the content itself, instead of on the people creating it. That’s how it plays out on r/golf, anyway. One of the pleasures of scanning the group’s message board is not knowing — or particularly caring — whether the comment you just read about, say, golf-ball dimple patterns came from a mini-tour pro, a Titleist rep or a pimple-faced tween, addressing the world from his parents’ garage.

U/GreenWaveGolfer12 is none of the above.

A 33-year-old Michigan native, he played golf as a kid then gave up the game before returning to it after college, when he settled in North Carolina, married with no kids and weekends free to play. Curious about everything from equipment to courses, he tested the waters on several golf forums, including GolferRx, which he says he found educational “but really for the serious diehards.” R/golf felt more approachable, a better place to get his feet wet again.

“I liked the fact that you could ask pretty much anything and get an answer right away,” he says. “And you’d get input from golfers of all skill levels and experience from all over the world.”

After posting actively on r/golf for several years, he signed on as moderator just prior to the pandemic. At the time, the group had around 200,000 subscribers, a figure that, like so much else in golf, was about to boom. 

“It got real busy real quick,” he says.

Moderators are not Reddit employees. U/GreenWaveGolfer12 earns his living in finance and says he spends about an hour a day in his unpaid r/golf role, enough to tag team with his fellow mods on the 150 to 250 new posts that come in each day. The most common messages concern equipment, whether it’s a seasoned player asking for input on a specific club or a newbie wondering where to get a starter set. Current events in golf tend to stir up interest, too, though it’s tricky to predict what will really get the community roiling. Where Tiger Woods’ car crash in 2021 triggered a tsunami of comments, some of them more scandalously speculative than others (“My worst day as a mod,” U/GreenWaveGolfer12 says of the hours he spent sifting through dubious and redundant posts), Jon Rahm’s recent headline-making jump to LIV produced relatively modest ripples on the r/golf message board. Last month’s news about tee-time brokers gaming the Los Angeles muni system might have been a local story, but it brought about more widespread back-and forth in the forum than did Anthony Kim’s internationally ballyhooed return.

News

Whatever the topic, r/golf has written rules in place, posted prominently on its landing page. No solicitation, spamming, buying, selling or trading. No political posts. Be polite. If it’s NSFW (not safe for work) it’s not appropriate for r/golf, either.

To some extent, of course, the standards are subjective. Lines can blur, as they often did in the early days of LIV and the outbreak of golf’s civil war, when UGreenWaveGolfer12 says he had his hands full trying to separate impassioned, on-point posts from remarks that could have passed for heated campaign speeches.

“There are obviously cases where golf and politics have overlapped, especially when Trump was president or when his courses started working with LIV,” he says. “A lot of (a moderator’s job) comes down to weighing which comments have real golf value, and which are devolving into something else.”

R/golf is at its best when it is personal, not partisan, which turns out to be a lot the time. As with most subreddits, the tenor of the comments can be nerdy and pedantic (Interestingly, dot punched face clubs tend to generate more spin from the fairway, but perform poorly from undesired lies). But patronizing posts are the exception. The group atmosphere is beginner-friendly, and even the most naive queries are more likely to be met with words of welcome or gentle wisecracks than with withering rebukes. That many of the questions could be easily answered with a few keystrokes on Google (What’s a birdie? Can someone explain the Stimpmeter system?)  underscores r/golf’s most endearing trait: many users aren’t so much seeking information as they are craving connection. In that sense, R/golf is a search engine with a human touch.

People share achievements (just broke 90 for the first time ever);  vent frustrations (had half my clubs stolen); request counsel (how do I fix my slice?) and commiseration (I’ve had the yips for 6 months and I’m losing my mind). And the community responds with encouragement, compliments, consolation, and comic relief.

“The two main draws for me are that you can get really specific on pretty much any topic, and that the communities are filled with some very funny people,” says a 41-year-old IT worker who subscribes to more than 300 subreddits, including r/golf, where he posts as SpiderDice.

Nearly a year ago, SpiderDice found himself in need of a laugh when the woman he’d been dating broke things off abruptly. His first impulse, he says, “was to go comfort shopping,” which resulted in his purchase of a new Ping putter. His second impulse was to tap into r/golf’s communal sense of humor, which he did by borrowing a trope he’d come across in another subreddit, where subscribers used unrelated life events as excuses to acquire new stuff.

SpiderDice’s post on r/golf, which he put up along with a photo of his new flatstick — my girlfriend dumped me, so I bought a new putter — drew just the sort of comments he had hoped for. 

Just for that, I’m buying one too. 

Much cheaper in the long run. 

You probably deserved it . . . (the putter).

“For me, it was a fun distraction,” SpiderDice says. “But it’s also a good feeling to know that people have your back.”

By all appearances, others can relate, as similar-themed posts have since become a recurring gag on the group message board.

My in-laws came to visit so I bought myself new irons.

Got bored in class so I bought myself a new putter.

Got ghosted on Tinder so bought new irons.

(Reply: Nothing feels like a Mizuno, not even your ex.)

R/golf is a world of virtual connections, but its ties sometimes stretch into real life. Subscribers have been known to give away clubs to others in the group who can’t afford them. Invitations to private clubs get extended. People meet up at their local munis to play. 

As an illustration of actual community, no example stands out quite like the story of u/inaaace, a frequent r/golf poster whose cancer diagnosis several years ago became a galvanizing force. Over the course of his treatment, as u/inaaace shared the details of his emotional and physical ups and downs, the real man behind the user name took poignant shape. His name was Milos Bogetic. He was tall, tattooed and married with two young kids, and his accounts of life at home, on the course and in the chemo chair revealed him to be witty, defiant, loving, scared. His posts made plain his fondness for the r/golf group, and the r/golf group reciprocated, with support that extended beyond uplifting posts. They gifted Milos with clubs, played rounds in his honor, and raised money to send him to Scotland for a bucket-list loop on the Old Course at St. Andrews. The actor and director Justin Wheelon, one of the rare r/golf users who posts under his real name, invited Milos to caddie for him in a PGA Tour pro-am. The two struck up a friendship. Last year, while shooting a video at Grove XXIII, Michael Jordan’s private club in Florida, Wheelon got Rory McIlroy to record a video message for Milos, who was such a fan of the Northern Irishman that he’d named one of his children Rory.

Six months ago, Milos posted: I’m still around my friends fighting this tough battle. . .I haven’t had a chance to play much golf because I’m pretty much spending all my days in the chair. Longing for the days when I can get back out there. Miss golf and banter with you.

Three months ago, he posted: Alive and in hospice . . .

A month later, a user named AnthonyATL updated the group: I’ve dreaded this day for such a long time and unfortunately it is finally here.

Milos, AnthonyATL wrote, “was always a bit of a cynic and I don’t think he had much faith in humans as a species.” But, he added, “the greatest gift you all gave to him was knowing there were still plenty of good and decent people left in the world so he didn’t need to worry as much about leaving his family behind.”

Among the hundreds of replies, a friend of Milos’ who’d joined him on the Scotland junket shared a photo of a monogrammed golf ball, the only one of many he’d kept from their trip.

The rest, he wrote, were “scattered around the Old Course and Crail.”

This lone surviving ball, the friend promised, would soon be teed up in tribute to Milos, “likely on a path straight out of bounds, just as he would have intended.”

In the photo, the writing on the ball is clear: “Milos and r/golf were here. 2023.”