I consider Reddit to be some kind of social site of the American psyche. It is where people share their emotions unhesitatingly, unreservedly, and unrestrainedly. It seems messy to look at visually and even messier to read. What to think of it all. Let's find out.
It began in 2005 - started by college roommates - and bought by Conde Nast shortly after. It is basically a bulletin board system.
Reddit is about the people who post there, so all the headlines about Reddit are actually Reddit posts - so are Reddit content. With 430 million monthly users, there is a lot of writing going on. This bulletin board site has 138,000 active communities. The way the front page works is the content is ranked by upvoting and downvoting entries. I checked out the site. It is a shock to scroll through all that stuff on all kinds of content and particularly sports. It seems random at first and then it really has a lot of sports entries.
There is one entry ABOUT Reddit - Wikipedia. It says that Reddit has been a platform to raise publicity for a number of causes. It lists a few. And there are some notable publicity campaigns - one around Stephen Colbert. It goes through the Reddit April Fools' Day jokes since 2010. That year, every user was made an admin for 24 hours. That seems a bit scary to me. Each year there's a new experiment - none of this magnitude, though. There's nothing past 2022.
What is well known is the Ask Me Anything - AMA in Reddit terms. These are likely the best known Reddit entries - Bill Gates, Donald Trump, George Clooney, Margaret Atwood, and so on.
With decentralized moderation, user anonymity and lack of fact-checking, there is misinformation, distortions, pornography and so on. It would be hard to keep control of that much stuff, but it does appear they haven't tried all that hard.
Reddit does seem to be very much in charge of what we see in the internet feed on them. Vast numbers of Reddit entries. Every search with Reddit in the terms retrieves Reddit entries. Pick any topic and it is a Reddit community. I had to hit the more results button 20 times before I got some headlines that weren't Reddit posts. Wow!
So much rain on the windshield, that Food Basics became an abstract.
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