Reddit – The Front Page of the Internet

We bet you didn’t know Reddit falls in the top 20 of the biggest social media platforms in the world.

But what exactly is Reddit, especially since it calls itself ‘the front page of the internet’ yet we probably don’t use it as much? Well, the basis is that it’s a huge collection of forums and posts where people share information and comment on the posts. Created by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman in 2005, it has garnered about 542 million monthly users worldwide.

When you open the Reddit home page for the first time, you’ll be flooded with information, particularly some of the best posts for the day. If you ever have a question session on Reddit under r/AskReddit, there are community guidelines you have to follow: “Questions must be clear and direct. No personalised advice requests. Open ended questions only. No personal info. No loaded questions. No questions seeking professional advice”.

It’s a whole thing.

Reddit has plenty of moderators, meaning that they tend to curate a lot of the content and may ban subreddits if they do not comply with the rules. If there are a lot of ‘likes’ or ‘upvotes’ on a post, it’ll move higher up the scale, meaning these are the first things you’ll see on the site because of its popularity, and you can easily join in on the conversation.

You might get lost at first, seeing as Reddit has its own language from slang such as TIL (today I learnt) or AMA (ask me anything). Reddit is carefully curated, it doesn’t allow any explicit content, but rather is a platform to discuss new issues, get into the minds of the people around the internet and see what everyone’s doing. The login process is easy (and free), so if you ever feel like being part of a group of strangers who will (hopefully) relate to your troubles, Reddit might just be the place to go.

: These are smaller communities of Reddit users. Or basically your social media squad.

: Too long, didn’t read.

: They’re the Reddit version of ‘likes’. The more you get, the higher you go up on the timeline.

: These are the opposite of ‘likes’. They’re more like ‘dislikes’. You’ll see these on YouTube too.

: Original posters. Like an OG of a thread.