Hello everyone. Unless you’ve been stuck on Mars growing potatoes, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about Reddit, which is touted as“the front page of the internet.” According to Alexa (an amazing company by the way), Reddit is the fourth most visited site in the US, and the eighth most visited site worldwide.
How Reddit Works
Basically, Reddit is a gigantic content aggregator. Individuals, groups, businesses, and even celebrities and your favorite bands (and their legions of fans) submit posts. These posts could be links, written messages (from short blurbs to long articles), videos, photos, gifs and more. Users then comment and upvote what they like, and downvote what they don’t. Posts and comments that get the most upvotes climb to the top of the ladder, and therefore get more views. Posts and comments that get the most downvotes get buried below the virtual ground.
Using Reddit
Signing up for Reddit is extremely fast — you just pick a username and password, and you’re in. It’s also free, which is always nice.
There are two basic ways to use Reddit. You can visit your homepage to see the most popular posts from the subreddits that you’ve subscribed to, or you can just browse your favorite subreddits (or take a chance if you feel lucky) to see what’s up.
Subreddits are sub communities of Reddit (in fact, Reddit acts as a meta-search engine that lets you search through all the subreddits). You can subscribe to as few or as many subreddits as you’d like. For example, you can connect with your fellow IT pros by visiting the subreddit /r/Sysadmin!
There are a few NSFW (not-safe-for-work) subreddits, but these are plainly marked and you can steer clear of them if you wish. Generally though, if you choose the right subreddits, you’ll find Redditors to be helpful and friendly. You can also send and receive private messages.
Karma
There’s a whole concept of Reddit karma. Whenever your fellow Redditors upvote your posts or the comments that you’ve made on someone else’s posts, you earn karma. This builds your credibility in the Reddit community. And while using Reddit is free, if you pay a subscription fee — or if people love your posts/comments so much they “give you gold” (i.e. they give money to Reddit on your behalf), then you’ll be able to participate in some exclusive subreddits, plus have more details on where your karma is coming from (it’s kind of like Big Data Analytics meets karma).
Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover
Also, here’s a pro tip: don’t judge Reddit by how it looks. Whereas some social media platforms are like luxury hotels, Reddit is more like a youth hostel. However, that’s part of Reddits appeal, because it’s really all about the content that Redditors provide. The scaled down interface also makes it fast and easy to use on smartphones, which is a big advantage.
Devolutions and Reddit: The Love Story
At Devolutions, we looooovveee Reddit! Each morning before we start work, you can find a few of us here checking out our favorite subreddits, like r/todayilearned. And many of the jokes on r/funny, /r/iiiiiiitttttttttttt/ and r/jokes quickly become running gags around here.
For work purposes, though, we mainly stick to r/sysadmin, as well as our NEW subreddits that I happily invite you to join:
Your posts and comments would be very appreciated, as our goal is to create a space where IT pros can connect and share— and of course, have some laughs over at r/ITcomics, which we created to lighten things up a bit. Working in IT can be tough and stressful sometimes, as you know!
What Do You Think?
Please tell us what you think of Reddit, and also please share any pro tips with our community (like “don’t feed the trolls”). Thanks, and see you on our new subreddits! ??