Just What The Heck Is Reddit Anyway?

Reddit.com is a very interesting website designed for those who want to read news found by fellow Internet users. Sharing news stories has been around for a long time, through the use of email, message boards, and other communication. However the catch was that you had to know someone in a community in order to get to these links.

Sites like Reddit aim to change that.

Reddit’s concept is simple, users create accounts like on any other site, and then upload links with a custom title to the page. The beauty of Reddit is that all the content is located on other sites, and is uploaded by users. The site it’s self does little work. What’s more, users can vote on links they like or dislike, and that then enters a filtering system. This system filters results to stories that are similar to ones you have marked as liked in the past, and filters out the ones that are similar to the stories you have flagged as dislikes.

For example, if you tend to stick to sports and entertainment news, Reddit would move those story types to the top of your list, and place stories on politics closer to the bottom. This system can work very well in most cases. However, there are problems with the site.

Since users post all the links and also are able to give them a title, sometimes a link is added that is named improperly or doesn’t make much sense. These links, however, are usually pushed to the bottom of the list by people who rate them poorly. As with any site geared toward user input, the content is only as good as its users. However, since the content found on Reddit is usually content from a professional source, good links quickly make it to the top of the list. This once again highlights how competitive and important the Internet news scene is. It also demonstrates the need for news websites to really step up when it comes to content creation. Because page views are going to increase based on sites and services like Reddit and search engines like Google.

Reddit’s layout leaves a little to be desired. Links are displayed in a very standard list, nothing very attractive, but also not ugly. You can sort links by a surprisingly small amount of categories, which include hot, new, controversy and top. The links can be further sorted by date added, which is a very nice feature. There is also a search function in place that works pretty nicely. What is very nice about the site is lack of ads cluttering up the place. There is a standard sized ad box on the left side of the page, but it doesn’t encroach upon page content, while still being in clear view of the user. You can also quickly “Reddit” the ad if for some reason you decide others might like it. In the end its sites like Reddit that fuel the social media, and use of them helps to build a better internet.