It’s a bit weird and it doesn’t have to do with other atrocious stuff on that website, but I noticed this a lot.
Cats are basically the official animals of reddit, even more so than the doggos, they are literally everywhere and it’s getting annoying, it’s not just reddit either, but most of the social media, cat literally does nothing, looks at camera and they post it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against cats, but why cats 24/7, why not some other animals like bears, monkes, crows, wolves, whales, dolphins, foxes, lizards etc? We have rodents here for example.
Idk what’s the reason for this but maybe I’m a bit biased because I like other animals more, but I’d like to know why is this, I’m interested.
Many people think that cats look cute/do cute things. When sharing images over the internet became a thing, cat pictures started becoming a thing. It really took off when Youtube appeared. Early youtube videos where either someone talking about something in front of a webcam or over a presentation, or people doing silly things and recording them. Well, the silly things category was very quickly overtaken by people sharing videos of their cats jumping around, getting distracted by lasers/toys, or being high on catnip, because it was easy and would generally get a lot of views and 5 stars (rating before the Like/Dislike buttons were introduced).
The short answer is: making likeable content centered on cats was easy and paid off.