By Elizabeth O’Dowd
Contributing Writer
Reddit, “the front page of the internet,” is an unlimited source of new and valuable content for everyone. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone. If it exists, there’s a subreddit for it. Like nail art? There’s a sub for that. Like conspiracy theories? There’s a sub for that. Want to see bears doing human things? There’s a sub for that too.
The main benefit of Reddit is, everything on the internet you would be interested in is right in front of you. The most popular posts in the categories you’re interested in will be on your front page, most of the time with lots of comments from other Reddit users, or redditors.
You can engage in a conversation with thousands of people, you can read all the comments and chuckle to yourself, or you can read the post and not the comments and move on to the next post. It’s really up to you.
But it’s not that easy at first. Reddit is a huge and wild place, especially because it’s a text-based web page, and finding your interests can prove daunting if you don’t know where to start.
As an avid redditor myself, it took months for me to actually use Reddit after I created a username. Where to start and what to use it for takes time to figure out, but follow this article and you will be Reddit savvy in no time.
First things first, install the “Reddit Enhancement Suite.” Trust me, when the page looks better, it’s much easier to browse through, and it’s free. The Enhancement Suite makes Reddit look beautiful, and makes it much easier to navigate. You don’t have to click through to a third party website, like Imgur, just to see a picture or a gif. Also, it allows you to see how many upvotes and downvotes each post and comment gets.
It’s also more fun when you get into different subreddits. You can make yourself a tag so people can identify what you stand for and what point of view you’re going to bring to the discussions. For example in the NFL subreddit, r/nfl you can tag yourself as a New England Patriots fan so when you comment, everyone will know who you support to give better context to the discussion.
Creating a username is easier on Reddit than any other site. You don’t even need an email. The only reason you might want to give an email is for account recovery and password changing. Reddit will never spam you for any reason.
Reddit is all about people sharing things with each other and they look out for the user. They won’t bog you down with ads and spam like many other social networking sites.
When you first sign in as a new user, you will be subscribed to basic subreddits or categories. These are some of the most popular and most universal and include things like r/books, r/news, r/technology and r/aww (everyone likes cute puppy pictures).
Go through these subreddits and unsubscribe to the ones that you’re not interested in. If you’re not into gory pictures, unsubscribe from r/wtf immediately.
Once you do that, there are a lot of places to find cool subreddits. You can search a keyword on the Reddit search bar. If you search “fitness,” there will be a lot of subreddits that pop up under the search bar with a number next to them. That number indicates how many times your keyword was mentioned in that subreddit.
Under fitness, there’s r/getmotivated for people who have trouble getting motivated to work out and want to support each other. There’s also r/running, r/crossfit, r/loseit, and many more that are dedicated to their specific aspects of fitness. For each thing you search, there are broad categories and there are smaller categories.
Subscribe to all of them, or only a few. If you decide later that a certain subreddit isn’t what you thought it would be, you can simply unsubscribe and move on. That sub will no longer show up on your front page.
You can also find subreddits on other websites like subreddits.org. Start searching your interests and go from there.
Once you have a list of subreddits, it’s time to explore. The greatest thing about Reddit is its anonymity. There are people with much more karma than others, but there aren’t people whose posts will make it to the ever-coveted front page over anyone else just because they have more karma.
The only people who are Reddit famous are actual celebrities (SnoopDogg, or I guess SnoopLion, is a frequent Redditor), and novelty accounts like “UniDan,” a guy who can tell you exactly what any bug is if you upload it to his subreddit r/unidan. Usernames aren’t displayed largely so most of the time, you won’t even remember who made what post.
What is this Karma, you may ask? Karma is your ratio of upvotes vs downvotes. There are two types of karma: link karma and comment karma. Comment karma is the easier of the two to obtain. Every time you post a comment on someone else’s post, people can upvote you if they like what you say, or downvote you if they disagree or think that you’re totally off topic.
The more upvotes you get, the higher your comment karma score goes. The more down votes you get, the more your karma score goes down. The harder of the two is link karma. You gain link karma by posting a link to another site.
This is harder because you have to post original content and that’s difficult a lot of the time because Reddit is usually one of the first places where news is posted, so you either have to be on the ball on a certain topic, or very creative. You also can’t post the same link as another person in the same subreddit on the same day.
Along with the two types of karma, there are also two types of posts: link posts, as mentioned above, and text posts. Text posts are simple and most of the time, personal. There are certain subreddits that only allow link posts, like r/technology, because they want to make sure that all of the content has a viable source.
There are certain subreddits that only allow text posts, like r/offmychest, because the posts there are supposed to be personal and rant-ish. You can’t gain karma for a text post, which seems unfair because a lot of the time your text posts will be more popular than link posts because they are more engaging. The reason you can’t get karma on a text post is to prevent people from making up stories just to gain karma.
Yes, people make up stories all the time. There is no rule that says you can’t do this, although people tend to not like it much. Reddit is a great place to go for support from people who know nothing about the situation you are in.
The fake stories used to bother me, but they don’t really anymore because the ones that I see that get the upvotes are good stories and they entertain me. They can be funny or sad, but the truth is, there are a lot of great writers out there and even if a story isn’t entirely genuine it’s still a great read.
Not everything in Reddit goes though. Reddiquette exists as a general guideline for all posts in all subs. In every sub, there is a box on the side that lists the rules of the sub, plus a link to Reddiquette. Reddiquette basically tells you to be polite, make sure your posts are grammatically correct, and that you don’t bully or “flame” someone just because you disagree with them. Treat people on Reddit how you would treat people in real life, if not, you get banned or your post gets removed.
This is where the moderators come in. Mods are people, who aren’t paid, who manage subreddits. Each sub has its own set of mods; the bigger subs have way more mods than the smaller ones do. They are like the RAs of Reddit; they will help you out if you have a problem, but they’ll delete your posts and ban you from their sub if you don’t follow the rules.
They try their best to be fair, and are almost always right. Mods are the backbone of Reddit and keep all the subs from collapsing in on themselves with irrelevant and bad content.
There are endless ways you can use Reddit because of the diverse community of Reddit as a whole. It’s a great place to ask questions about anything, seek advice, advise others and share your ideas with people who will find them interesting. If a subreddit doesn’t exist already, you can create a new one and be a moderator.
It’s a little scary how small Reddit makes the world seem. You can find someone just like you from halfway around the world, or find someone to relate to and share your ideas with. There is no limit on what you can do with this community.
