Until recently, Reddit was, to me, a lot like professional soccer in the United States;  people around me didn’t seem very interested most of the time, but those that were fans, were FANS.  About 6 months ago, I decided to jump down the rabbit hole myself and see what all the Reddit fuss was about.  

For all of my tech nerdiness (no really, you should have SEEN the number of gadgets I took on my last vacation – it was embarrassing) I’m surprisingly hesitant to jump on the bandwagon when a new website, social network, or gadget is released.  It took me 3 years to break down and buy a Kindle, I joined Twitter about 4 years after everyone else did, and I still haven’t been tempted by the Snapchat craze (explain to me why that’s fun, again?)  So I was shocked when I was hooked almost immediately by the site.

Reddit is…hard to describe. The site claims to be the “Frontpage of the Internet”, and the idea is that users submit content, and other users upvote or downvote the posts.  In the process, the cream of the crop is supposed to rise to the top.  But, that depends on what you define as “cream of the crop.”  Users are by and large male, somewhat tech savvy/nerdy, and young (I would say about 18-35, judging solely on the maturity level of the comments I read) so the content tends to skew toward items that demographic finds interesting.  The site is composed of thousands of subreddits, each catering toward a specific topic.  When users sign up, they choose which subreddits to follow, and they are presented with a customized homepage that caters specifically to their interests.   You can find a subreddit on almost anything from the tame to the wild (NSFW, folks!) but for the most part, if you can imagine it, there’s a subreddit devoted to it.

So, what is Reddit for, specifically?  News is common (it has been credited with breaking several news stories before traditional media outlets), but I also use it for catching up on local events (there are subreddits for almost every major locality), checking out some cute animal photos, and generally just getting a good giggle*.  I Am A is a fantastic subreddit, where users provide their occupation, and encourage other redditors to AMA (Ask Me Anything)- Barack Obama did an AMA as part of his last campaign, Bill Gates is the biggest name up on the  subreddit’s homepage right now, and authors and actors have been participating more and more as part of their promo for an upcoming project.

Some of my current favorite subreddits (they change daily) are:

Today I Learned

Explain Like I’m Five

Today I Fucked Up…

Ask Reddit (surprisingly helpful AND hilarious)

Take a tour for yourself, and see what it’s all about.

 

* your mileage may vary on the giggling, I am a lady who loves me some Seth MacFarlane….