Digital Media Concepts/Reddit

Reddit is a community-determined aggregator of content. It’s a social news aggregation. Users can submit contents such as photos, videos, links, text post, which are then determined by users through the ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’ button. Reddit is split out into many communities, or ‘subreddits’, which have their own topics of interest and it can vary from games, food, animals, news, sports, etc. Subreddits have their own rules that users must follow before submitting a content that will be judged by ‘moderators’ if it follows the rules. Reddit was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005.

As of March 2020, Reddit is ranked 6th most visited website in the United States and 18th Worldwide according to Alexa Internet.

Site Overview
Reddit is a user-generated content where users post photos, videos, text based, links, and discussions. As of October 2019 there are 430 million monthly active users, called redditors. The site works through different communities called Subreddit, where redditors post contents on certain topics. There are subreddits on everything from food, games, photos, entertainment, sports, etc. There are more than 100,000 active subreddits and anyone can find their own communities. Post can be upvoted or downvoted, based on how redditors likes it. The most upvoted posts in a subreddit can sometimes make it on the Front-page of the website where everyone can view the post. Reddit is known for “The Front Page Of The Internet.” Everyone can start their own reddit accounts, you only need an email and a password. Since it's easy to make an account, people you meet and talk through reddit are anonymous.

Subreddits/Moderators/Rules
Subreddits are created by redditors. These redditors manage their own Subreddit, becoming something called ‘moderators.’ Moderators are users who volunteer to manage their community. To start being a moderator, you need to be promoted by a moderator or by creating your own subreddit. Each Subreddit follows their own rules before you post a content or before you reply. Moderators then check your post if it violated any of the rules and then can decide whether to take down your post.

Karma
Karma score is to show how much interaction the user gets in their post or comments. The score goes up if your comment or post get an upvote, and goes down if it gets a downvote. This score doesn’t give you anything other than a self accomplishment.

Reddit Gold
Reddit Gold is a premium memberships option that gives you the benefits to remove ads, create a gold only subreddit, and customized avatar. The main point of gold is that you can gift it to other users. Gifting a gold shows appreciation to a post and how much you like the post. Users can give this if a post gave them a good laugh, heartfull story, or just feeling generous. Gifting gold to strangers is something common in Reddit.

Ask Me Anything (AMAs)
This is an interaction from users to users. AMA is a user answering questions from other users. There is a whole subreddit r/IamA where AMAs are common. The format is “I am a ….., Ask me anything” The blank can be replaced from a janitor to Barack Obama.

Controversies
With 330 million active users, there would be some bad apples. In recent years, [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communities Toxic communities] have been left unattended in reddit. In 2015 CEO Steve Huffman updated their rules of policy which banned most of the toxic communities. People say that this ban is like shooing criminals away, but in a study in 2017 It shows that the banned work and the toxic users use less hate speech than pre banned.

In 2017 Reddit banned one of its most toxic forums called r/Incels This is a misogyny group. Reddit has banned alt-right communities before. Subreddit like r/incels served as an alt-right recruitment, which went against their policy resulting in bans. This doesn’t make users happy but more skeptical because one of reddit's most controversial communities r/The_Donald is left alone. r/The_Donald is like Trump-centric reddit. With what Steve replied to when asked “Is obvious open racism, including slurs, against reddit's rules or not?” he answered with, “It’s not”. r/The_donald have walked and went over the line of racism repeatedly without any backlash from the reddit is making users annoyed and confused.