The Beginner’s Guide to Reddit

If you’ve become bored of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you need to check out Reddit. Don’t be concerned if you’ve visited the site once or twice before and decided that it wasn’t right for you because, unfortunately, the mechanics of Reddit are not at all obvious. If you’re interested in anything, then I’m pretty sure you’re going to like Reddit a lot.

Step 1:  Create an Account

Reddit wooed me right from the start with its simple sign-up process. You only need two things:  a username and a password. Associating an email address with your Reddit account is optional, but it’s probably a good idea to do so to ensure you don’t lose access to your specific username.

Step 2:  Subscribe to Subreddits

If you stick with the default settings Reddit will serve up heaps of content that might strike you as trivial (think funny pictures of cats and headline news that was already impossible to avoid elsewhere). Reddit becomes more useful once you learn about subreddits, which organize the web-based content according to interests. There are too many to list, but some of my favourites that you might like are Documentaries and HealthyFood (note:  the names of subreddits never contain spaces). People constantly post information about almost every topic you can think of as well as much stranger stuff (see DeepIntoYouTube).

Redditors (experienced Reddit users) typical refer to subreddits in writing as /r/subrredditname.  To navigate to any subreddit quickly you can type www.reddit.com/r/subredditname.

If you’re into reality TV, you might enjoy /r/Relationships, which you’ll find at www.reddit.com/r/Relationships.

After you subscribe to as many subreddits as you like, your mainpage will be populated by content drawn from all of your subscriptions. Ideally your customized homepage will be more enjoyable (addictive) than Reddit's default homepage.

Step 3:  Participate

So far you might not be impressed because, after all, if you know how to use Google, you already know how to search for things that interest you online. The simple magic of Reddit is its upvote/downvote system that separates the best content from all the boring stuff. Registered users constantly upvote content that they enjoy while downvoting content they dislike. The result of this is brilliant because you can filter the best content by hour, day, week, month, year and all time. When I’m new to a subreddit, I look up the best content of all time is in order to get a feel for whether the content is interesting to me overall. If I decide to subscribe to that subreddit the best content of all time will change relatively slowly, so I’ll check out the items the community has promoted across a shorter timeframe, such as the past week.

Bonus

Once you start nerding out over Reddit you might want to check out this spectacular documentary about its founder, Aaron Swartz.  https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz

Photo by Eva Blue (CC BY)