Time and again, we have seen celebrities tweeting their followers that they will be available on Reddit for a AMA session. You might have come across some good links on Reddit. Reddit was also on news for the recent celebrity leaks. Sadly, many of the novice and day-to-day users still have no idea about this wonderful website and how it can help in many ways.
What is Reddit?
Reddit was started by two people Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, for the sole purpose of gathering everything interesting on the monstrous internet, organize it and present to the users all across the globe. Think of Reddit as the interactive and live Newspaper of the internet, where you’ll find everything that’s going on from popular articles, posts about work, TV Shows, family, business, finance, anything and everything. You name it and it’s there on Reddit. Reddit’s slogan is ‘The front page of the internet‘ which when you read or go through it, will certainly seem right. Everything on Reddit is well-organized and moderated and the company consists of only 51 employees.
First page of reddit
Why the name Reddit?
Reddit when said slowly, sounds more like ‘Read It’ which means I ‘Read it’. In this way you can tell your friends ‘I read it on Reddit’ which, once you spend timing there, you might be saying to everyone you meet.
How it works?
Reddit is one of the easiest website to use. Once you get hang of it, you won’t find any other website which is more cool or organized than Reddit. But how does Reddit work? Well actually it doesn’t. We, the users of internet make Reddit work. If you have any interesting post, videos, images, articles, blog you want to share with the world, just register, find it’s topic and post it. If you have a funny dog video, open the funny videos categories and share i. The post will then have an ‘Up’ or ‘Down’ arrow besides it, where user can rate your post. The more ‘Up’ votes it gets. the upper it moves on the page, visible to every visitor. This simple logic makes Reddit give its users the best stuff, not rated by some critic or moderator, but by ourselves, the public of internet. Its like a talent show where we are the judge.
So all you need to do is register, find a category you like and share whatever you have and is relevant to that category. People will vote based on their choices and who knows, you might get poplar on Reddit, if you start posting cool and awesome stuffs regularly.
How to use Reddit?
Reddit users are called ‘Redditors’. When you visit Reddit, you’ll see posts from random subreddits at your screen. You can either view any one of them, or you can surf through categories. Assuming you’re a novice user, it would be good if you view the posts and get an idea of what goes on. Reddit users comment on all posts expressing their views and opinions, which you can ‘Up’ or ‘Down’ vote too. If some user has shared a spam link under false name, it’ll have lots of Down votes by various users who visited, warning others to skip that link. If you see something with lots of Up votes, it means it is basically something interesting which redditors want you to see.
Each category is a ‘Subreddit’.
Categories and subreddits
There are many subreddits like funny, gaming, programming, interview questions, politics, atheism, movies, technology, celebs, etc. There’s even a subreddit for each country, its states and cities. One of famous subreddits is ‘Aww‘, where people share cute and adorable stuffs and has 5 million readers. However there are some weird subreddits like ‘Birds with arms’ and ‘Animals didn’t have necks’. You can find all types of subreddits. If you can’t find, create one. Each subreddit has posts only related to that particular topic. If you’re only interested in Gaming, you’ll see only stuffs related to games in that subreddit. You can search, and Reddit will give you the posts related to your search below the various subreddits that are active. People can discuss and take part in the subreddit by commenting, and the comments with most Up votes comes to the top. Generally the users are anonymous, hence no-one thinks before telling the truth. All the comments are arranged in a way that makes it readable and help users take part in the conversation taking place.
Search in Reddit
You might com across posts abbreviated with keywords like OP (for “original poster” – the user who posted the submission being commented upon) or NSFW (for “not safe for work”). Users earn “link karma” and “comment karma” for submitting popular links and comments, which accumulate as point values on their user profile. Users may also be gifted “Reddit gold”, if another user has well received the comment or post.
Reddit also has a special type of subreddit ‘IAmA‘ which stands for ‘I Am A‘ and ‘AMA‘ which means ‘Ask Me Anything‘. In this subreddit, a person asks redditors to ask them any questions. Many famous personalities have participated in the IAmA subreddit, some of them are 3 engineers from ISRO, Bill Gates, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stan Lee, Roger Federer, Illusionist David Copperfield, Priyanka Chopra, Amanda Palmer etc. Every comment in the subreddit is chronologically arranged and organized.
Since Reddit contains everything that is available on the internet, you might come across some stuffs that might freak you out. But remember, that is not because Reddit wants it there. As stated above, people run reddit hence, the weird stuffs out there is because of the people. As you start using it frequently and join the subreddits that suit your interests, you’re main page will adjust accordingly and show you stuffs you like.
Philanthropic efforts
Reddit is often known to initiate a lot of charity work from redditors. Some of them are listed below:
- Reddit users donated $185,356.70 to Direct Relief International for Haiti after an earthquake devastated the nation in January 2010.
- Reddit users donated over $70,000 to the Faraja Orphanage in the first 24 hours to help secure the orphanage after intruders robbed and attacked one of the volunteers, Omari, who survived a strike to the head from a machete.
- Reddit started the largest Secret Santa program in the world, which is still in operation to date. For the 2010 Holiday season, 92 countries were involved in the Secret Santa program. There were 17,543 participants, and $662,907.60 was collectively spent on gift purchases and shipping costs.
- In early October 2010, a story was posted on Reddit about a seven-year-old girl Kathleen Edward, who was in the advanced stages of Huntington’s disease. The girl’s neighbors were taunting her and her family. Redditors banded together and gave the girl a shopping spree at Tree Town Toys, a toy store local to the story owned by a Reddit user.
Reddit can be highly productive or irritatingly time absorbing, Its upto you, as it is what you make it. If you haven’t used Reddit, try it and once you get hang of it, you’ll wonder how in the earth you lived without it.