"What made this one different,' he says, "was that people felt a connection and ability to interact with the story more than just be a passive listener."
Unlike other podcasts, Serial had countless documents to pore over and obsess, scrutinize and argue over. "It was useful for me to visually keep track of names and places," he told me over the phone. He was one of the first to join the Serial subreddit and compiled the page's character list.
Before stumbling onto Serial he says he had no interest in true crime, and only visited Reddit from time to time.īut as he sank into the details of the case, he needed a space to organize his thoughts. When White isn't moderating the Serial subreddit, he works as a Broadway stagehand in New York City. "I had never really seen a community like this one," says Jacob White, 34. Visit the subreddit and you'll find, among other things, a transcript of each episode, cell phone records of calls made by Adnan, a list of everyone ever mentioned in the podcast, at least 19 different maps (including a global map of all Serial subreddit subscribers), homemade "guided tour" videos of the areas featured in the podcast, polls, photos, related links, and more.
Some Redditors took it upon themselves to crack the case, going to incredible lengths to uncover some piece of evidence that Koenig hadn't, searching for proof of Adnan's innocence or else a clue that would condemn him beyond a reasonable doubt. So they threw themselves into Hae Min Lee's case wholeheartedly one user admitted to developing a Pavlovian reaction to hearing the first notes of the podcast's theme song. Redditors are nothing if not obsessive - perfect targets for the minute-by-minute discrepancies, countless characters, the theories, counter-theories, and conspiracies of Serial. Serial found a particularly fertile fanbase in Reddit, where the Serial subreddit just hit 30,000 members yesterday (compare that to This American Life, with just over 2,000 subscribers). Koenig even landed a coveted spot on one of The Colbert Report's last episodes. It not only draws an average estimated 2.2 million listeners per episode, but has inspired at least one so-so Miley Cyrus mash up, one slightly more respectable Biggie remix, a Funny or Die parody, and a spot for Koenig on our very own 2014 Verge 50 list. The debut season of Serial - which chronicles the journalist Sarah Koenig's tireless, personal, nit-picky yet captivating investigation into the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and the conviction of her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed - is arguably the first podcast blockbuster.
But now that the first season of Serial is in the can, will the Reddit devotees stay on the case, or will they dissolve into the ether of the web, and move on to the next obsession?
I am going to miss it dearly.") In all, the subreddit got more than a million page views on the day of the finale. Most redditors were pleasantly surprised by the show's last episode ("Fucking fantastic"), others grieved for the end of a show they'd grown to embrace.
Reddit's /r/serialpodcast, created to serve the fanatical following of one of the most successful podcasts of all time, had already been named subreddit of the day, and by mid-afternoon, the listing and comment pages were pulling in over 80,000 page views every hour. Early yesterday morning - Thursday, December 18th, 3:21 AM ET - a corner of the internet exploded.