You Reddit Beginners Guide
Reddit is one of the most popular websites in the world, in fact it is the Eighteenth most popular worldwide. It is also the Sixth most popular in the USA. Of course, Reddit is a Social Media, but it is quite different from the rest. At the heart, it is a social sharing website. Links, pictures and text are all shared, and voted on by the members. The highest vote-catchers are rewarded by increasing visibility and wider distribution, while the most unpopular fall downwards on this scale, until it becomes extinct. Let us now examine this interesting phenomenon more closely and follow this Introduction To Reddit.
Fact Check
Reddit was founded by the famous trio of Steve Huffman, Aaron Swartz and Alexis Ohanian. Its parent organization is Advance Publications, with subsidiary titled RedditGifts.com. Steve Huffman has been the CEO since July 10th 2015, till the present date. Reddit was founded on June 23rd 2005, at Medford, Massachusetts, USA. The present Headquarters is located in the city of San Francisco, California, USA. Reddit has been written in Python and React Programming languages. Two 22 year old graduates of the University of Virginia, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, originally found Reddit after getting funds from a company called Y Combinator, in June 2005. In October 2006, they sold it to a Publication house, Conde Naste. This was. Then, starting on September 2011, Reddit has been operating as a direct supplementary of Advance Publications, Conde Naste’s parent company. Advance Publications also owns a large number of other popular Internet sites, newspapers, magazines and cable TV channels. Some of these are quite well known in their own right, such as, Web Monkey, Style and Wired News. In 2008, Open Source was transformed from Reddit’s Source Code, and all codes were obtainable on Github. By May 2010, Reddit was being touted as one of 2010 Hottest San Francisco Companies. But Reddit was still suffering from chronic shortage of funding. This leads it to introduce Reddit Gold, in July 2010. Costing Users just US$3.99 per month, it offered a whole lot of features to User Members. This included a trophy on the Member’s User Page, the option of viewing double the normal comments shown without clicking, and so on. In August 2011, Reddit’s main competitor, Digg.com, attempted to change their business model, which resulted in a mass migration of Users to Reddit. This in turn created Reddit’s target member as a 35-44 year old male, with some collage education and an income of US$25,000 to US$49,000. In a startling turn-around, Reddit jumped from around two million unique visitors per month, at the time just prior to Digg’s misadventure, to over 15 million unique visitors per month just after it. Reddit’s traffic continues to grow, as does its profile.
Structure
Beginners are sometimes confused with their first look at Reddit. So an explanation of its structure follows. Reddit is further divided into several million bits, which are known as ‘Subreddits’. Each Subreddit talks about a new topic, and the name starts with ‘/r/’, this being an URL section that Reddit uses. For instance, ‘/r/nba’ is a Subreddit in which the topic of discussion for the members is the National Basketball Association. The Home Page or Front Page on the Reddit site shows a number of trending posts in current use, which are pulled from a variety of Subreddits. Selection can be made by clicking the ‘Sort’ button to separate the ‘hot’ or Trending Topics from the rest. Any Reddit account holder can create a Subreddit for any topic. Of course the Community Guidelines must be strictly followed. ‘Mods’ or Moderators are volunteers who edit the appearance of a particular Subreddit, manage the activities, and dictate what type of content are allowed in that particular Subreddit. They have the power to delete content or posts, or even ban Users from the Subreddit. Overall power is vested in the employees of Reddit who govern the administration.
Reddit Premium
Reddit Premium can be purchased by members in order to support the Community. At the moment for a Reddit Premium of US$6 per month, Premium Users have access to features and powers far in excess of regular members.
Signing Up
Readers who are interested in signing up for membership of Reddit, may do so by visiting the Login Page, and confirming their User name, Password and Email, before verifying that the applicant is not a robot. Members are welcome to hold multiple accounts. They can set up multiple User names and have their choice of which Subreddit to participate in at that point of time.
A Final Word (Or Two)
Reddit’s star continues to rise, along with its burgeoning traffic. And so does its reputation as an egalitarian society. And all the while, it becomes more high profile, and this concludes our Introduction To Reddit.
