Reddit is a user submitted social news site which calls itself “The front page of the internet”. Anyone can view the material on Reddit but you would have to register an account if you would like to vote on the submitted material or if you would like to customize your experience, the point of submitting content is for ‘karma’, or simply imaginary internet points. Material is grouped into subsets(subreddits) so if you would like to view only political news or gifs of cats, there is a subreddit for that. Recently Reddit underwent a change in their default subreddits(what an unregistered user would see) where they removed one of the most popular subreddits, /r/AdviceAnimals which specializes in memes, better explained as internet inside jokes.
The Good: Reddit is a great place for certain communities, I always refer to /r/dogecoin as one of the best communities that I have ever been a part of, I list some of their fundraising ventures in my feature about Dogecoin. /r/IAma is also a great place to be able to interact with celebrities or most anyone else you may admire, some noteworthy AMA(Ask Me Anything)’s include President Barack Obama, Bill Gates and very recently Julian Assange. Beyond its communities and celebrities Reddit does what it is supposed to do very well, it compiles links from news sites in one place so you don’t have to mess with your browser’s RSS feeds, just go to the subreddit of choice and there you should have it. I have also found Reddit to be useful in learning, when I first signed up almost two years ago I knew next to nothing about CSS or programming, through individual community assistance I have people to consult when I am lost.
The Bad: Redditors like to think of themselves as part of some indie/underground culture when the reality is that Reddit is one of the most popular websites on the internet. Taking a look at the front page right now while not logged in, I would say not even half of the top 25 posts are worthwhile, currently the top 3 are a Flintstones gif; a picture of someones game inspired cappuccino and a meme. I may have praised certain communities in ‘The Good’ but as a whole the individual subreddit communities are terrible, in most popular threads’ comment sections you will be met with ongoing puns and re-referenced inside Reddit jokes. To put the inside joke mentality into perspective, let’s say you have one friend whose idea of being funny is to recite lines from movies/television or just keeps talking about the same thing from a year ago over and over again. There is also an oft-referenced hivemind mentality that comes with Reddit, if you are unfortunate enough to declare your position on a topic and it happens to not be the popular decision, you can expect to hate when you see your new message indicator.
The Ugly: Reddit has not been without its controversies, taken from its own wiki:
- Anderson Cooper of CNN devoted a segment of his program to condemning /r/jailbait and criticized Reddit for hosting it. Initially this caused a spike in Internet traffic to the subreddit, causing the page to peak at 1.73 million views on the day of the report. In the wake of these news reports, a Reddit user posted an image of an underage girl to /r/jailbait, subsequently claiming to have naked images of her as well. Dozens of Reddit users then posted requests for these nude photos to be shared to them by private message. Other Reddit users drew attention to this discussion and the /r/jailbait forum was subsequently closed by Reddit administrators on October 10, 2011. Critics such as /r/jailbait’s creator /u/violentacrez disputed claims that this thread was the basis of the decision, instead claiming it was an excuse to close down a controversial subreddit due to recent negative media coverage.
- A year after the closure of the jailbait subreddit, a Reddit community called “/r/Creepshots” drew controversy in the press for hosting sexualized images of women without their knowledge. In the wake of this media attention, /u/violentacrez was added to /r/Creepshots as a moderator,and reports emerged that Gawker reporter Adrian Chen was planning an exposé that would reveal the real-life identity of this user, who moderated dozens of controversial subreddits as well as a few hundred general-interest communities. Several major subreddits banned links to Gawker in response to the impending exposé and the violentacrez account was deleted. Moderators defended their decisions to block the site from these sections of Reddit on the basis that the impending report was “doxxing” (a term for exposing the identity of a pseudonymous person), and that such exposure threatened the site’s structural integrity. Chen published the piece on October 12, 2012, revealing that the operator of /u/violentacrez was a middle-aged programmer from Texas named Michael Brutsch. Within a day of the article being published, Brutsch’s position was terminated by his employer and the link to the exposé was briefly banned from Reddit. He stated on Reddit after the article was published that he has received numerous death threats.
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