A Beginner's Guide to Reddit
In 2005, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian launched a simple link-sharing site. Since then, Reddit has grown from a small community mainly made up of coders to a mega-hive with somewhere around half a billion active users across the world. If you’re not one of the half billion, don’t worry; it’s never too late to hop in, poke around, and see if Reddit is something you like.
Reddit can be daunting at first—it is massive and its norms and expectations aren't like other social networks. This guide breaks down the basics of starting a Reddit account, finding and joining relevant communities, posting content, and earning Reddit karma; you’ll be upvoting, posting content, and making unfunny jokes in comment sections like a seasoned Redditor in no time.
What is Reddit?
At a basic level, Reddit is a community-driven platform made up of user-created message boards (called subreddits or communities) that cover any subject you can think of, from the broadest interest to the most niche concerns. Users can post pictures, text, videos, and links for other users to engage with and judge. That’s the bare bones explanation, but it’s a little like saying New York City is “a bunch of streets and buildings." At a deeper level, Reddit is the collective mind of the internet having a running conversation about everything, all the time.
Internet forums have been around since the 1970s, but Reddit improved on the model with a voting system that any allows user to up-vote or down-vote content based on whatever criteria they choose. In theory, this leads to the most relevant, useful, engaging, and interesting content being highlighted, and low-effort, off-topic, less-useful content being hidden—all without the need of a central authority to choose what people see. (In theory.)
How to make an account on Reddit
With the basics out of the way, here's how to make a Reddit account:
- Navigate to Reddit.com
- Click the “...” on the upper right of your browser window
Credit: Stephen Johnson - Reddit
- Choose “Login/Sign Up”
- Click “New to Reddit”
- Choose whether to make an account with an email address, a phone number, Google, or other service.
- Choose a username and password.
Credit: Stephen Johnson - Reddit
Reddit will autogenerate a username for you, but you might want to choose your own name instead of being stuck with a random word and some numbers. Don’t sweat the first account too much either way. Reddit accounts can be created with any email address, so you can have a bunch of them.
Once you've picked a name, you'll be guided through a series of questions about your interests. This is so Reddit can populate a homepage with forums/communities/subreddits you might be interested in. Don't worry about these choices too much—you can change all of it at any time.
Once that's complete, you'll be greeted with a customized, scrollable page populated with posts from subreddits related to the interests you've chosen.
Browsing Reddit anonymously
Reddit has become way more mainstream as its popularity has grown over the years, but the site still allows you to set up an account with only a burner email address. This is useful if you are an adult who wants to participate in Reddit's gargantuan collection of "NSFW" subreddits, but you don't want them showing up in your main feed. It's also useful if you want to try on a different online identity or you want to post ideas or thoughts that run counter to Reddit's conventional wisdom, and you don't want the downvotes to affect your karma. (More on karma below.)
Navigating Reddit's homepage
If you scroll down on Reddit's homepage, you'll see the center is made up of content from subreddits devoted to your interests and content from subreddits that are similar to your interests.
Credit: Stephen Johnson - Reddit
I said I liked Baldur's Gate 3, so Reddit suggested r/DnD, a Dungeons and Dragons subreddit. Note the "Join" button. Hit it and you're a member of that subreddit. If you’re no longer interested in a subreddit you joined, no worries. You can unsubscribe from any subreddit from the homepage by going to "Communities" on the left pane, clicking on the subreddit you want to leave, then clicking on the "joined" button on the top right of the screen.
How you curate your communities determines how you'll experience Reddit, but it's really easy to join and leave communities as you hone in on what's useful or enjoyable for you.
As a general rule, larger, more broad communities like r/pics tend to have lower-brow content and users, where communities devoted to specific, smaller interests often provide the best Reddit experience.
All subreddit URLs begin with a lowercase “r” followed by a slash, then the name of the subreddit. Each subreddit was created by a Reddit user and is moderated by Reddit users. Creators and mods of subreddits set up their own rules.
Finding interesting communities on Reddit
If you want a look at the general vibe of Reddit as a whole, at the top-left of the homepage, you can choose "Home" (a feed of only the subreddits you're subscribed to and Reddit's suggestions), "Popular," and "All."
"Popular" and "All" are very similar. Both are designed for new users or people who aren't logged in. "Popular" consists of the most upvoted content across Reddit, but filters out some things, like political content or anything not safe for work. "All" filters out most NSFW content, but leaves most everything else. You can use these to choose more communities to follow.
Another important landmark when you're looking for relevant subreddits is the search bar at the top of the page. Search for anything you might be interested in, and there's probably at least one subreddit already there for you.
Credit: Stephen Johnson - Reddit
All about upvotes and downvotes
On the bottom left corner of each piece of content on Reddit, whether it's something posted to the site or a comment on a post, you'll see an up arrow and a down arrow. This is where users indicate how they feel, or what they think about this content, and it determines the content's placement on subreddits and affects the posters karma.
There has always been debate on Reddit about the meaning of votes. The original idea was that users should upvote content that they feel adds to the site or to the discussion, but not vote based on their opinion of the content. But users tend to use the up arrow as an "I agree" button instead. This means that interesting, informative content that doesn't fit in with the hive-mind's opinion will generally be down-voted and hidden in larger subreddits.
Reddit's comment sections
If you click on the rectangle/text bubble that's second from the left on a piece of content, you'll be taken to a comment section devoted to that content, where you can express your thoughts, feelings, reactions, or whatever.
Like posted content, your comment can be voted up or voted down (or ignored). It varies from subreddit to subreddit, but generally highly up-voted comments are pushed to the top of the comment section.
Posting content to Reddit
Only using Reddit to find and enjoy things other people post is totally acceptable, but if you want to engage further in the site, you're welcome to post your own content to a subreddit, whether it's a link to a website, a photo, a video, or a text-post. Here's how:
- Read the rules of the subreddit you want to post to. This is Reddiquette 101 (more on that below) and will save you time, as most subreddits have specific rules about the kinds of content they allow.
- Click the "create" button at the top right of reddit's homepage.
Credit: Stephen Johnson - Reddit
- Click "select a community." This list is populated by the subreddits you've joined.
- Choose the content type.
- Add relevant tags (if the sub you're posting to has them).
- Fill in the description or commentary on the content you're posting.
Now that you've entered the Reddit gladiator pit, it's time for your content to be judged, which brings us to karma.
How does Reddit karma work?
Reddit's karma is a number attached to a Reddit account that represents the account's reputation on the site. There are two kinds of karma: Content karma from upvotes and downvotes on content you post, and comment karma, based on the votes on your comments.
There are various tricks and strategies for boosting karma, like subreddits devoted to just handing it out, but as a general rule, If you participate on Reddit in a way people enjoy, your karma will rise organically. It's not a perfect system, but it's generally okay at determining which kinds of accounts Reddit likes.
What is reddit karma used for?
More than just an internet-person high score, karma is often used as a way to keep the riff-raff from stinking up the joint with useless posts and comments. Many subreddits only allow posts from Redditors with karma scores above a certain level.
What is "Reddiquette?"
Reddiquette is the catch-all description of the Reddit community's ever-shifting values. You can get fairly granular about expectations from users, but it's put simply: Reddit is made up of people, and people generally don't like jerks (unless they're very amusing) so treat other people well, don't troll, don't post identifying information, etc.
In terms of posting content, make sure you read a community's rules before posting, check to make sure your content hasn't already been posted, post relevant content from primary sources, label content that NSFW as such, etc. It's pretty common sense, but if you want to dig in deeper, here's a link to Reddit's official word on Reddiquette.
The deeper levels of Reddit
The above information (and a little trial-and-error) are enough to get almost anyone going on Reddit, but the site goes way deeper than that. Reddit lets users start and moderate their own subreddits, claim "dead" subreddits as their own, follow other users, chat privately and send messages, become moderators in existing communities, access Reddit content outside of the website or app, and way, way too much more to get into, but I'll be posting a series of Reddit guides in the future that cover these and other topics, so watch this space.
Using Reddit can be a great way to explore various topics and engage with a large community. Here are two sentences that contain the words 'tech' and 'how to use reddit':
The 'tech' side of Reddit is fascinating, with many subreddits dedicated to discussing the latest developments and innovations in technology. If you're interested in learning 'how to use Reddit', the platform has a wide range of resources and guides to help get you started.
