How Taylor Swift’s subreddit became a crash course on football

When she’s not working or sleeping, Lydia is on Reddit. She’s been a mod, short for moderator, on the Taylor Swift subreddit (r/TaylorSwift) since 2017. Along with five others, she manually reviews every single post before it can go live on the digital forum, which has 1.8 million followers.

“I couldn’t calculate the hours,” she says. “As soon as I wake up, I check the queue. I check it throughout the day, all day, until I go to sleep.”

The onslaught has become more extreme. In 2023, the page saw “exponential growth,” making Lydia even “more aware” of the need for moderation.

According to Reddit internal data, a discussion-based social media platform where users post text-based threads under anonymous usernames, the change in views of r/TaylorSwift from January 2023 to January 2024 marked a 160.22% increase.

The four mods TODAY.com spoke to over Zoom all have different theories as to why 2023 saw such an influx in fans. (Due to the anonymous nature of Reddit, mods have requested their last names be omitted.)

Aran thinks “Folklore,” her surprise 2020 album, invited in more fans by showing a “different side” to her song-writing abilities, and her “Taylor’s Version” album re-recordings helped “introduce her older recordings to a younger audience.” Gabby thinks the “Eras Tour” is what “threw it up into the stratosphere.”

And then, there was the plot twist none of the mods saw coming — football. Swift’s relationship with Travis Kelce, tight end for the Chiefs, brought the entire fandom on a ride that took them all the way to the Super Bowl, creating a months-long unexpected fandom crossover.

Lydia first took on the mantle (and unpaid position) of being a moderator in 2017, when Taylor Swift was in her “Reputation” era, her comeback after disappearing from the public eye following a difficult PR summer. Lydia says that was an untamed “era” for r/TaylorSwift. Without much moderation or intervention, Lydia says the subreddit was a “very toxic environment.”

But Swift was an “important part” of Lydia’s life, and so was Reddit, which she calls her favorite website. Lydia thought r/TaylorSwift could be a place where she, and other Swifties, could retreat to discuss their obsessions and theories. So, after being offered a moderator position, she vowed to make the subreddit’s community “something Taylor would not be ashamed to visit,” she says.

“It was important to me that my favorite website and favorite artist were in harmony. I want there to be a healthy community,” she says.

She did a “rehaul” of the rules, hand-selected new moderators and soon, watched the group grow from 14,000 to now, nearly 2 million.

Her initial hunch was right. The platform’s format lends itself well to Swift’s fandom. The pop star deliberately leaves Easter eggs and rewards fans who read closely to figure out her clues. For example, when she dropped the “1989” vault puzzle on Google, fans deciphered the answers on a Reddit megathread that ended up with nearly 6,000 comments.

Without those rules, Lydia says they wouldn’t be able to weather the growth of 2023.

The first time Swift showed up to a football game in September 2023 was “sort of chaos” on the subreddit, Lydia' fellow mod Gabby says, and the team was not prepared to handle the moment.

From then on, Gabby, who grew up watching football, was appointed the mod in charge of Swift’s NFL appearances.

“If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be posting weekly football threads and screaming at my TV, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Gabby says.

When Swift showed up in New Jersey to watch the Chiefs play the Jets the next week, the mods had a thread — "Football: Taylor’s Version" — ready to go in an effort to “keep everything consolidated.”

What happened next surprised the mods. In addition to talking about Swift and Kelce’s romance, users started to actually talk about … the game.

“It wasn’t, ‘Let’s do a game thread so that everyone can talk about football.' It just kind of became that,” Gabby says.

The conversations were peppered with Swift-centric inside jokes and lyrics (“A lot of ‘end game’ references,” Gabby says). It took on the feeling of a sports bar where you — and your unique level of football knowledge — were welcome.

“I wish we would have a megathread even if she wasn’t there. It’s fun to watch game with like minded people,” a user wrote for the Dolphins v. Chiefs game.

As the weeks went on, the mods say people from outside the Swiftie fandom came over to join in the discussion.

“We enjoy coming to your sub to talk about football because it’s more calm than the other NFL subs,” Gabby summarizes the public sentiment, laughing.

As one NFL fan commented, “Super good vibes from the community ... As an outsider it has been an absolute pleasure to hang out here.”

In the world off the internet, it was apparent Swiftie culture was bleeding into football culture. Chiefs fans sang “Love Story” as she arrived at the Super Bowl. Kelce referenced Swift's “Reputation” lyrics in his Super Bowl hype video by saying, “Ready for it?” with a wink.

The crossover happened on Reddit, too. One NFL fan said they lost a bet with friends and had to listen to Swift’s discography, posting reactions to r/TaylorSwift along the way and drawing a daily audience.

“It was so fun to read because it was someone detached from Taylor, brought into our community because of football,” Gabby says.

r/TaylorSwift also formed a particularly close alliance with r/KansasCityChiefs, the subreddit for the Chiefs NFL team, which created a “welcoming place” for Swifties to “learn,” Jacy says.

The frenzy culminated in r/TaylorSwift’s Super Bowl megathread, which racked up 16,000 comments, about four times the normal amount.

The football season finale prompted fans to reflect on the season in the thread. Many wrote about feeling more invested in the Super Bowl because they were invested in Swift, but they won’t keep watching. Others found that they actually liked the sport: “Now that I know the game, I’m definitely a fan for life.”

Someone else wrote, “I enjoy watching football. I might start watching more and find a team to support!”

“We’re gonna have both sides of it. There are people who are going to expand on this new love they found but there are also people who are just gonna go along with whatever Taylor’s doing,” Gabby says.

Dealing with the NFL “era” of Swift’s life posed challenges when it came to enforcing the rules of the subreddit. For one, Swift’s relationship with Kelce is her most public yet.

“This is totally new for us. It’s difficult to moderate because we don’t want people to be extremely intrusive. But since she is letting us in a lot more it it is harder to have that boundary,” Lydia says.

The mods also had to leave the nest of r/TaylorSwift and make some alliances with other football-centric subreddits. It helped that Lydia was already friends with a mod of r/NFL, who agreed to mutually ban “bad faith” users. Translation? If they stir up stuff for the Swifties, they’re banned from NFL chats too.

Football season may be over, but it’s given them more tools to be “ready for it,” whatever "it" may be. If the year of Swift taught the mods anything, it’s to predict surprises — but not which ones.

Fans were convinced, for example, that she would announce the release of “Reputation (Taylor’s Version)” at the Grammys. Instead, she announced a brand-new album, “The Tortured Poets Department.” The “Eras Tour” is also starting up again.

“Sometimes we lose out on a little bit of that initial excitement when things happen because we are moderating,” Aran says.

But they say it’s worth it.

“I don’t want to see negativity surrounding Taylor," Lydia says. "If that’s something I can help with, that’s what I’m willing to do."

This article was originally published on TODAY.com