What is Reddit & How to Use it [Beginners Complete Guide]
We all love to discuss, gather information, speak, or write our thoughts, debate, and sometimes we even fight with just words. And now, the Internet has provided us with a stunning service using which we can do these things with the public online, and this astounding website is named Reddit.
According to Wikipedia, Reddit is an American social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website. If you are a registered member, you can easily submit your content to the site such as links, text posts, and images, which are then voted up or down by other members.
It is a discussion forum where posts are organized by subject into user-created boards called “subreddits”, which cover a vast variety of topics such as news, politics, science, movies, video games, music, books, sports, fitness, cooking, pets, and image-sharing.
Submissions with more up-votes appear towards the top of their subreddit and, if they receive enough up-votes, ultimately they appear on the site’s front page.
So, let’s understand how you too can stay updated with this awesome website.
1. Basic Info
Let us gather some basic information about Reddit before getting into the process of using it.
The official website link: https://www.reddit.com/
- Name:
The name of the website “Reddit” is itself a play-on-words with the phrase “read it”, which means “I read it on Reddit.”
- Users:
The users of this website are called, “Redditors”.
- Moderators:
These are the admins in a subreddit.
- Karma:
Reddit uses karma as a way of showing the best possible content to the users. This karma is divided between “post karma”, that is the total points of all the threads they posted, and “comment karma”, which is the total points of the comments they submitted to existing threads.
- Subreddits:
These are the topics or groups/communities in Reddit, to which a post is related. Basically, it is a group of people with similar interests. You can easily search subreddits in the search bar and follow them.If you search a subreddit it will appear with “r/” and the name of the profiles of a subreddit will appear with “u/”. Click or tap on a profile name with “u/” to view their profile.
- Votes:
Users can also comment on others’ posts to continue the conversation.
One of the main features of Reddit is that you can vote on a post or a comment, and these votes can be both positive or negative, or in “Reddit’s words” these votes can be Upvote or Downvote.
These votes determine where a post will appear on the site.
The “front page rank”, for both the general front page and for individual subreddits, is determined by a combination of factors, including the age of the submission, positive (“upvoted”) to negative (“downvoted”) feedback ratio, and the total vote-count.
Note:- Sometimes you might see the posts with lower votes are placed higher than the posts with higher votes, this is due to something called “time-decay algorithm”. Don’t worry this is just to help the newer content to advance as well.
Also Read: How to Get Verified on Twitter (Complete Guide)
2. Getting started
To use the service you can either go to the official website or you can download the app from the play store (for your android) or from AppStore (for your iPhone).
This app is just 32MB in size.
What makes Reddit different from other online networking platforms is that you don’ need an account to use Reddit. However, in the long run, you might need one.
Let us see how to sign up for Reddit:-
- First, go to the official website.
- Click on the “Sign up” blue button at the top right corner of the screen.
- Enter your e-mail or continue with Googe or Apple Account.
- Enter your details and verify your account.
Also Read: How To Get Verified on Facebook (Complete Guide)
3. Interface
Let us understand the layout of this website and app respectively.
- Website:
1) When you open the website you will see the “Front page” of Reddit, where you can see the popular and trending posts and also the posts of your interests.
2) In the search bar at the top of your screen, you can search the subreddits, aka topics of your interests. Also, when you search the subreddits, its name will appear with a “/r”.
3) To follow the subreddit through the posts, click on the “Join+” button present at the post.
4) When you click on the post you can see the comments form below, and if you want to leave a comment, log in or sign up. Under the comments, you can also find more related posts.
5) At the top of the screen on the left side, you can see the net number of votes here. Also, here you can upvote or downvote the post. However, if you want to vote you will have to make an account.
- App:
1) Here also, when you open the app, you will land on the home page will see many posts of your interests. If you want, you can sort the posts by tapping on the You can also go back to home by tapping on the Reddit icon at the bottom left of the screen small down arrow at the top of the posts.
2) If you slide to the popular tab you will see popular and trending posts.
3) Under each post, you have options to vote, comment, and share the post respectively.
4) Tap on the post, then tap the bookmark icon at the top right to save the post.
5) The search bar option is present to search your favorite topics that are present at the top of the screen.
6) To upload a post on Reddit, tap on the pen icon in the middle bottom of the screen.
7) For personal chat with someone, choose the chat icon on the right side of the pen icon.
8) For “Notifications”, “Messages” and “Mod mails”, tap on the message envelope icon in the bottom right of the screen.
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