Why You Should Pay Attention To Reddit

It’s a way to find like-minded people. Reddit replaces old forums, social networking groups, and hobby groups. The core of the site is subreddits, themed communities. All users can create them, and the range of topics is limited only by some of the site’s rules. Of the more than three million sections created, about 130,000 remain active – and everyone can find a community to their liking.

You can join any subreddit, like posts, communicate in comments, or publish your own posts. Just look for the section you’re interested in and join in. Active community members become moderators and administrators, and the most creative ones create their own groups and gather an audience. Learn how to sell reddit accounts.

Turning a crazy idea into a subreddit and attracting tens of thousands of people is commonplace. Just ask the catapult enthusiasts. And then their eternal opponents, the trebuchet enthusiasts. It seems to be almost the same thing, but there are almost 400,000 people watching the mock confrontation.

We haven’t even talked about the sections like the one where people think of life as a computer game and opening the fridge as saving in it. Or sabreddit, where trained bots pretend to be people. Or subreddit, where people pretend to be bots who pretend to be people.

It’s an abyss of entertaining content. It’s where memes and funny videos often appear before publishers or telegram feeds. In 2018, researchers from University College London analyzed more than 160 million memes and found that most of them went viral from Reddit and 4chan. The situation is similar with viral videos, but here Reddit’s main competitor is Tiktok.

This is an abyss of useful content

Because of its large audience, Reddit is also a very powerful recommendation service. Western journalists even believe that it is much easier to google something, adding the word reddit to the query, which increases the chances of finding the answers or advice you need.

For example, the community will tell you what kind of technology to choose, what its advantages and disadvantages are, and what to do if it breaks. And in the threads, you will constantly find lists of useful services, best practices, and cautionary tales.

If you have a hobby, it’s worth finding a subreddit about it right away. There you can not just learn something and learn new things, but also become part of a community, share your successes, get answers to questions and support.

It’s a place on the Internet where there’s always something going on

Reddit lives off the community, which is constantly finding new things to do. People on the site like to come together and make their jokes, interests, and activities seen by the whole internet.

The ironic conspiracy story that all the birds on Earth are long dead and replaced by U.S. government spy drones has gone from a local sabreddit to quite a mass movement. And news of a missing girl blogger led to a massive search with Google map analysis and social media travel videos. These are just a couple of examples of life on Reddit-something similar happens there almost every day.

The Reddit administration also comes up with its own activities for users. For example, the legendary “Place,” where users painted over pixels on a huge canvas. For several days, communities scaled their drawings, fought among themselves, raided other people’s drawings, and formed alliances.

A glossary of some Reddit terms

  • Sabreddit – community.
  • Upvote and downvote – likes and dislikes.
  • Karma – the internal rating of Reddit users, they get grades for both posts and comments.
  • Get on the home page – a post gains so much popularity that users see it on the home page of the site.
  • Get “gold” – the post or comment is so liked by users that they reward it with a special gold badge. Gold awards are purchased for virtual currency, but the author of a “gold-plated” post gets coins for free.
  • OC and OP are the marks on Reddit. The first stands for “Original Content,” meaning it was made by the author of the post himself. The second is “Original author of the post,” to distinguish it from the mass of commenters.
  • AMA – Ask Me Anything. This marks the question and answer sessions with celebrities and regular users.
  • TIL – Today I Learned; “Today I learned that…”
  • TL;DR – Too long; Didn’t read, “Too long, didn’t read.” This is not only analogous to “Too many letters” – you can find a brief retelling of a post or story in the comments with this label.
  • NSFW – “Not safe for viewing at work.” There’s a lot of explicit content on Reddit, so some of the posts are best not viewed on the big screen at the office.

How the feeds are structured

The structure of Reddit seems confusing at first. The home page of the site is a set of feeds where you can view posts. Some feeds are only available to authorized users, while others are open to everyone.

On Reddit, it’s best to register, even if you don’t plan to write or comment on anything. This way you can subscribe to interesting subreddits and eventually form your own feed. Without authorization, the site will show posts from a standard set of popular subreddits by default. But that’s only a few dozen communities out of hundreds of thousands. So it’s worth signing up, spending a little time and building your own unique feed of subscriptions.

Another “hardcore” option is to use the r/all section. All posts on the site are displayed there.

What to subscribe to first

There are several ways to find interesting new communities on Reddit. For example, there is a Top Communities section on the right side of the site. Clicking on it opens a section where communities are divided into categories and there are also tables of subscriber growth.

Check these tables periodically: new and non-obvious sections that have started to gain an audience dramatically often end up there. The official Reddit apps have a Discover tab: click on the search icon to see what you’re invited to subscribe to.