Reddit is the largest online community in the world and also very popular in Germany. TECHBOOK explains what Reddit actually is and how the site works.
It calls itself full-bodied “The front page of the internet” – and with about 1.6 to 1.7 billion visitors per month is Reddit actually rightly self-confident, because that ranks the page up 20th place the most visited websites in the world. The portal has also become increasingly popular in Germany in recent years, because in May 2022 there were about 3.4 percent of users German. This makes them the fifth largest Reddit community after the US, UK, Canada and Australia – and from a non-English speaking country at that. This is remarkable, because Reddit has a high entry level due to its complicated, nested structure.
There are always rabbit holes, because the Reddit community often has answers to the most unusual questions that have not been answered anywhere else. Since Reddit is primarily used by people with an affinity for technology, there are many solutions and tips here for even the craziest and least known devices. But the site offers much more than that. TECHBOOK shows you how to find your way on Reddit.
Third party controversy
In a bid to make the platform profitable, Reddit — much like Twitter after it was acquired by Elon Musk — has announced a controversial change. Providers of services that access Reddit’s developer interface (API) now have to pay to do so. However, the cost of doing so is so high that many smaller developers cannot afford it. For example, Apollo, a popular alternative to the Reddit app for the iPhone, has to be shut down at the end of June. In protest, many subreddits were switched to “private” by the moderators for 48 hours and were no longer accessible from outside. A number of subreddits are continuing the protest.
Where does the name “Reddit” come from?
Reddit is a pun on the phrase “read it”. For example: “I read it on Reddit”. Reddit users are referred to as “Redditors”. Reddit was founded in 2005 and since then the platform has grown rapidly. The IPO is planned for the end of 2023. So far, Reddit is mostly free to use, either through the website or the app. The platform is financed by advertisements. However, since 2010 there has been a premium membership, with which you can bypass the advertising.
“Dive into anything”
First of all, you should know how Reddit is organized – because Reddit does not consist of a single large community, but of many small ones: These are called subreddits and anyone who has ever been to a classic Internet forum has an idea of how subreddits are created must introduce. There are countless discussion rooms within Reddit, each dedicated to a different area of interest and whose content is posted by the users themselves. The really big topics are gaming, sports, business, crypto and celebrity, but basically there is nothing that does not exist. Instead of a higher-level editorial team, the community manages the content itself: Users rate links, images, videos or texts that have been put in by upvoting and downvoting – the more upvotes a post gets, the more prominently it is placed in the subreddit or even on the start page.
And there are an unmanageable number of these subreddits, because everyone can open their own subreddit. The motto “If it exists, then there’s a subreddit for it” has become established on Reddit. And so you can find places on Reddit where you can discuss your favorite football club, share funny gifs and videos, or read fan fiction. Classic subreddits like r/funny, r/aww or r/todayilearned have around 30 million users worldwide. By subscribing to subreddits you like, you create your very own Reddit, tailored to your personal interests. The website is different for each user and that is one of its great strengths.
This is how subreddits work
Once you have found a subreddit that you like, you can subscribe to it – similar to a channel on YouTube. If you now log in to Reddit, you will see the front page. All current, positively rated contributions from the subscribed subreddits can be found here on one page.
A post on the front page can look like this example from the subreddit r/funny. The upvotes are displayed at the top left. Subreddit names are always preceded by an “r/” because the names are also part of the URL. This makes it easy to access the respective subreddit without detours via the address field in the browser. Although Reddit is a predominantly English-speaking platform, there is also a lot of exciting content for German-speaking users. The German community is growing steadily: r/de now has 1.2 million subscribers, compared to 269,000 subscribers in 2021.
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Automated bots are also on the move
There are numerous bots circulating on Reddit, i.e. autonomous programs that can interact with users. Bots crawl all or specific subreddits for fixed keywords and then reply to them. A variety of bots are programmed to correct common spelling or grammatical errors in the subreddits. But bots can also provide more information on certain topics, convert units or sometimes just comment on something totally pointless. Users can upvote or downvote bots with “good bot” or “bad bot” in a comment. For anyone who wants to get an overview, Reddit offers one list with active bots and their triggers.
The karma thing
Reddit has a karma system to help tell if someone has previous experience in the community. Karma is an approximate evaluation of how many upvotes you have received on posts (“Post Karma”) and comments (“Comment Karma”). Of course, only the votes of others are counted, not your own. According to the FAQ, Comment Karma’s coinage is closer to a 1-to-1 ratio than Post Karma. So many upvotes for helpful, nice or intelligent comments help to drive up the karma score faster. Some subreddits will only let you in if you have a certain karma number.
Reddit is for adults only
Finally, a warning, especially for parents: the motto “if it exists, then there’s a subreddit for it” is actually serious. Subreddits set their own rules for the content they submit. In addition to many fun, informative, and stimulating communities on the platform, other subreddits also feature pornographic content and images and videos of scenes unsuitable for underage eyes.
As part of the Black Lives Matter movement, 800 moderators wrote an open letter demanding stricter rules against racism, hate speech and sexism. Since then, Reddit has tightened its policies against hate speech to the point that thousands of subreddits have been banned from the platform. Among them was r/The_Donald, arguably Donald Trump’s largest supportive community at the time. Overall, the tightening of the community rules is a turning point in the history of Reddit, since the platform had always been very cautious about the content of the subreddits before. Although the non-adult subreddits that exist are labeled with a warning, they are just as much a part of Reddit as pictures of kittens and funny gifs. Reddit is therefore an adult site.