Why Reddit is so popular – and how to use it correctly

Ranked higher than Zoom, Twitch, and Roblox, Reddit is one of the world’s top twenty most popular websites. It offers a wealth of entertainment and utility, comprising tens of thousands of forums organized by interests. Whether you want to ask Bill Gates a question, read captivating stories, share your inventions, or browse hundreds of cat-in-sink photos, Reddit has got you covered. For the majority of its 17-year history, Reddit has referred to itself as the “front page of the internet,” and it certainly lives up to that label.

However, Reddit’s interface may prove daunting to uninitiated users, particularly in Russia. With so much happening on the site, it’s not very user-friendly. Nevertheless, we encourage users to give Reddit a shot, and we provide tips on how to navigate and comprehend the site.

Why You Should Pay Attention to Reddit

This is a way to find like-minded people

Reddit replaces old forums, social media groups, and interest groups for people at the same time. The basis of the site is subreddits, thematic communities. Anyone can create them, and the range of topics is limited only by some platform rules. Of the more than three million sections created, about 130,000 remain active, and everyone can find a community to their liking.

You can join any subreddit, like posts, communicate in comments or publish your own entries. Simply search for the section that interests you and join in. Active community members become moderators and administrators, while the most creative ones create their own groups and gather an audience.
Turning a crazy idea into a subreddit and attracting tens of thousands of people is commonplace. Ask the fans of catapults. And then their eternal opponents – fans of trebuchets. It seems almost the same, but nearly 400,000 people follow the humorous confrontation. This is not even talking about sections where people imagine life as a computer game, and opening the refrigerator is saving it. Or subreddits where trained bots pretend to be people. Or subreddits where people pretend to be bots pretending to be people.

This is a bottomless pit of entertainment content. Here, memes and funny videos often appear before they do in public groups or Telegram channels. In 2018, scientists from the University College London analyzed over 160 million memes and found that most of them spread across the internet from Reddit and 4chan. A similar situation exists with viral videos, but here Reddit’s main competitor is TikTok.
First and foremost, it’s worth subscribing to Memes, Dank Memes, and me_irl for memes. For other entertaining content, subscribe to Funny, Gifs, and Made Me Smile.

This is a bottomless pit of useful content

Due to Reddit’s large audience, it is also a powerful recommendation service. Journalists even believe that it is much easier to search for something by adding the word “Reddit” to the request – this increases the chances of finding the right answers or advice. For example, the community can suggest which equipment to choose, what its advantages and disadvantages are, and what to do in case of breakdowns. And in threads, there are constantly lists of useful services, life hacks, and instructive stories.
If you have a hobby, you should immediately find a subreddit about it. There, you can not only learn and discover new things, but also become a part of a community, share achievements, get answers to questions, and receive support.

It’s a place on the Internet where something is always happening

Reddit thrives on its community, which constantly finds new activities for themselves. People on the site love to come together and make their jokes, interests, and activities visible to the entire Internet.

An ironic story of a conspiracy that all the birds on Earth have long been extinct and have been replaced by drones-spies of the US government has gone from a local subreddit to a quite popular movement. And news of a blogger girl’s disappearance led to massive searches with Google Maps analytics and tourist videos from social networks. These are just a few examples of life on Reddit – something similar happens there almost every day.

The administration of Reddit comes up with activities for users themselves. For example, the legendary “Place”, where users painted pixels on a huge canvas. For several days, communities scaled their drawings, fought each other, raided each other’s drawings and formed alliances.

Once upon a time, a button and a timer appeared on the website for one minute. Each click reset the timer, and it was unclear what would happen if you didn’t do so. Users pressed the button for three and a half months, and when they finally agreed to wait 60 seconds, the message “Experiment finished” appeared. By the way, the author of this button and “Places” later created the game Wordle.

Glossary of some Reddit terms

• Subreddit – community.
• Upvote and downvote – like and dislike.
• Karma is an internal rating system for Reddit users, they receive scores for both posts and comments.
• Getting on the main page – the post gains such popularity that users see it on the main page of the site.
• To receive “gold” is when a post or comment is so liked by users that they award it a special gold badge. Gold awards are bought with virtual currency, but the author of the “gilded” post receives coins for free.
• OC and OP – markings on Reddit. The first one means “Original Content”, which means the author of the post made it themselves. The second one is “Original Post Author” to distinguish them from the mass of commenters.
• AMA – Ask Me Anything, “Ask me anything.” These are marked sessions of questions and answers with celebrities and ordinary users.
• TIL – Today I Learned, “Today I learned that…”
• TL;DR – Too long; Didn’t read, “Too long, didn’t read”. This is not only an analogue of “Too many letters” – with this note, you can find a brief summary of a post or story from comments.
• NSFW – “Not Safe For Work”. There is a lot of explicit content on Reddit, so it’s best not to view some of the posts on a large office screen.

How reddit is arranged?

The structure of Reddit may seem confusing at first. The main page of the site consists of a set of feeds, where users can view posts. Some feeds are only available to authorized users, while others are open to everyone.

It’s better to register on Reddit, even if you don’t plan on posting or commenting. This way, you can subscribe to interesting subreddits and eventually create your own feed. Without authorization, the site will default to showing posts from a standard set of popular subreddits. But that’s only a few dozen communities out of hundreds of thousands. Therefore, it’s worth registering, spending a little time, and forming your unique subscription feed.

There is also a “hardcore” option – to use the r/all section. It shows all posts on the site.
This is what the separation of ribbons looks like on the main page. Source: reddit.com
Here are the types of ribbons and how they differ.

• Best. This feed is only available to registered readers. It shows posts based on the ratio of likes and dislikes and how much time the user spends in specific communities. This maintains a balance between mainstream and local subscriptions: a post in a million-strong subreddit with 80,000 likes and a post in a small community with 200 likes will receive approximately equal attention in the feed.
• Hot. Formed from recent posts that are actively discussed and liked. Therefore, it is updated quite often. One of the most useful feeds on the site if you want to see fresh popular content.
• New. Chronological feed. If you are logged in to Reddit, it shows the latest posts from your subscriptions, if not – popular subreddits.
• Top. This is a top of posts sorted by the number of likes. There are several options: popular for 24 hours, a week, a month, a year, and all time.

What is worth subscribing to in the first place?

There are several ways to find interesting new communities on Reddit. For instance, on the right side of the site there is a section called Top Communities. Upon clicking on it, a section opens where communities are divided into categories, and there are also tables that show subscriber growth.

Periodically check these tables: new and non-obvious sections often appear there, which have started to gain a sharp audience. In the official Reddit applications, there is a Discover tab: click on the search icon and see what they offer you to subscribe to.

The easiest way to find a community is to use the search function and enter the name of your favorite game, technology or hobby. It is likely that you will find a section that suits your interests. Look at the number of subscribers and make sure that the community is active: even in a tiny subreddit, there are usually several posts per day.

A small starter pack, which subreddits to pay attention to:

r/IAmA. The main feature of the community is its guests, who come to answer users’ questions and personally appear in the comments. Over the years, the heroes of question-and-answer sessions have included Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Edward Snowden, the author of three million Wikipedia edits, and a scuba diver who was almost swallowed by a whale.

• r/AskReddit. The opportunity for anyone to ask the community about their question of interest. The result – threads with thousands of comments about red flags during interviews, years-long attempts to find something on the internet, and non-obvious methods of fraud.
• r/MemeEconomy. A community where they try to predict which memes will become popular on the internet. To do this, they built a game mechanic of a “meme stock exchange”: users “buy” “shares” of memes on the rise and try to “sell” them before these same memes finally die.
• r/ShowerThoughts. A place where you can share non-obvious thoughts and questions. These often come to mind when you are standing in the shower, hence the name.
• r/TodayILearned. A section where unusual facts and stories are shared. Hence the name Today I Learned – “Today I learned that…”
• r/TIFU. It stands for Today I Fucked Up – “Today I screwed up”. Users share absurd, embarrassing, and sometimes tragic stories.
• r/LifeProTips. A subreddit with life hacks for every taste.
• r/AccidentalRenaissance. Here they share photographs that seem to refer to paintings of the Renaissance era. One of the main rules is not to photograph people in a state of alcohol intoxication, even if they are repeating “Creation of Adam” at that moment.
• Photos from Russia also contribute to the “Accidental Renaissance”. Source: reddit.com
• r/EvilBuildings. This is where real buildings are collected that look so sinister that a movie villain or “Evil Corporation” could be located inside them.
• r/BossFight. Strange photographs, heroes and atmosphere reminiscent of bosses from video games.
• r/FoodPorn. On Reddit, there are hundreds of communities with the prefix “porn”. They are not about explicit content, but about aesthetic content. Beautiful historical photographs, successful designer solutions, videos with calligraphy. “Food porn”, accordingly, is about food.
• r/WatchPeopleDieInside. Captured moments on video where people seem to “die inside”. An example would be the doomed look of a waiter who dropped all the dishes.
• r/NotTheOnion. Here they gather such insane real news that you can mistake it for the main satirical publication in the USA The Onion.
• r/DeepIntoYouTube. Subreddit users delve into the depths of YouTube to find interesting channels and videos. Unusual video bloggers with a couple of subscribers and dozens of views thus receive deserved attention.
• r/BirdsWithArms. A subreddit with a million people where birds with arms drawn on them are posted. It’s the whole section.
• The r/BirdsWithArms posts are worth seeing at least once. Source: reddit.com

How to promote Reddit

Reddit has been criticized for years for its inconvenience. The website’s structure, design, and layout can overwhelm inexperienced users and resemble more of early forums than modern social media sites.

The large-scale redesign of Reddit in 2018 raised questions even from veteran members of the community: not everyone liked the attempt to make the “front page of the internet” modern. Therefore, for four years now, alongside the main site, old.reddit exists where everything is the way it used to be.

The community that creates alternative clients, adds features, and provides users with more opportunities helps to make Reddit more convenient. Here are a few examples that will make the site better:

• Apollo is a convenient iOS client with a minimalist design, filters for subreddits, video viewing without quality loss, dark theme, and optimization for iPads.
• Boost. One of the most popular Android clients. Allows you to download videos, adds a widget to the phone screen, improves search and post viewing feed.
• Troddit. A web client, the main feature of which is the ability to set up multiple feed columns with posts on one screen.
• Reddit Enhancement Suite. This extension adds a plethora of new features to Reddit, including revamped comments, interface improvements, and a new post filter.
• Old Reddit Redirect. An extension for those who want to always browse only the old version of Reddit.
• RedditSave. You cannot download videos from Reddit – this site fixes the problem. Enter the link to the post with the video and choose the quality.
• Reddit Favorites. An aggregator of advice and recommendations from Reddit.
• Random Subreddits Generator. Generates links to several random subreddits. You can customize the topic and increase the number of suggested communities up to 50 at a time.