I’ve discovered Reddit also called “the front page of the Internet” occasionally about 6 years ago.
Reddit is one of the most engaging social networks with an interesting audience but a particular interface and rules.
As we speak, Reddit takes 8th place in the World and 4th place in the USA by popularity as per Alexa and, as you probably know, is a place where the users share and vote for content.
As per the description on Wikipedia, Reddit is social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website.
The registered community members on Reddit can submit content such as text posts or direct links.
Sharing content links or text, upvoting and downvoting is how Reddit works. You vote an item up in the ranking or you vote it down. Pretty easy-if you like something, upvote it, and if you don’t like something, downvote it.
All is clear for now.
Someone would probably say “Hey, these are the same things as any social network has by default these days “.More or less, yes.
Then why do some people find the environment of Reddit not very attractive compared to most of the others existing under the sun social networks?
The answer is not very difficult-the way Reddit’s UI is very specific and it’s slightly different from the other well known (and sometimes very similar) interfaces other networks use.
In fact, the way of organization of the users’ interface is similar in many ways, but still, the use of some specific terms, such as reddits, subreddits, Karma, MetaPost, etc. cause some confusion.
Honestly speaking I was not very interested in Reddit either the first time when I visited the site.
Probably for the same reason many people have these days — it takes a while to get familiar with how Reddit works, what you can do there and how to have fun.
For instance, Karma is related to the voting of posted content and resembles the quality of the post and the opinion of the crowd. When someone votes, they give or take away some Karma to whoever made the post or comment. When the shared content either link, text or comment is liked by others, the user who posted it receives Karma.
In simple words, Karma is the net vote count you got for your posts and comments on Reddit in total.
Downvotes and Upvotes [credit http://sumonmake.wapka.mobi ]
Karma does help to boost your popularity and respect in the Reddit community. If you are a new user, the rules of Reddit might really surprise you and piss you off before you even manage to post something.
The people who would like to get some content shared and voted for on Reddit must follow some particular rules. Compared to any other known popular social network seems to be not just strange but even weird at times, especially for the newcomers.
However, the existence of specific rules makes Reddit what is it and makes it different compared to any other social place. Reddit is a place to explore, share and discuss absolutely anything that doesn’t break the rules, which are strictly maintained by other fellow users, moderators and robots (AI) at all time.
The so-called subreddits in Reddit are topics or interests, have different aims, audiences, etc.
The groups and topics are not new for the social networks, but the way groups and topics are organized on Reddit is slightly different, compared to most of the existing ones. However, it will be correct to say that Reddit is simply an enormous forum categorized by a variety of topics called subreddits, where very specific rules apply.
When sharing something on Reddit-link or text depending on the topic, a specific subreddit has to be chosen; otherwise, the intended content will either not be published (filtered by the AI) or disliked=downwoted by the fellow Reddit users named Redditors.
For example, if you don’t follow the established rules or etiquettes in Reddit and post a text “I like Sundays” in a subreddit called r/news (the topics or subreddits’ names are usually preceded by an r/: i.e. r/weather, r/books, r/happiness, etc.)where are discussed the hot and exciting news, your post will undoubtedly be considered spam and receive many negative votes since your text is not related to the subreddit.
Depending on the ratio between the positive and the negative votes ( upvotes and downvotes) the shared content might become popular or, in case of irrelevant content or spam-to float to the bottom where no one will see it, just because no one likes it.
Voting is nothing new for social networks, but the way voting is presented on Reddit, it is.
Another similarity between Reddit and the other popular social networks is the tagging. Just like subreddits, when you tag a user Reddit will automatically link their account.
Behind the scenes of Reddit, there are many successfully implemented gadgets that together with the audience, make Reddit a great platform to use for many people.
Many things on Reddit are slightly different, and some of them might look strange compared to other places for socializing, but Reddit is genuinely a fantastic place with about 140K different communities to spend your free time, anytime you can afford it.
NB: As per Jeremiah, a friend of mine, Reddit is “a special place for an intelligent audience”.
Do you agree?
See the video: What is Reddit?https://www.youtube.com/embed/tlI022aUWQQ?feature=oembedWhat is a Reddit video [credit: https://youtube.com ]
If you still would like to learn a bit more about Reddit and get some valuable tips and tricks, you can have a look at this unofficial Reddit guide.