Each time you seek advice or more information on a specific topic, where do you tend to go? Do you look for someone who knows more about it than you and start asking questions? Do you grab your phone and quickly Google it? Do you go to the library for books on the subject and read? Perhaps you use the website Reddit along with the other seventy three million daily users, to find out more about a specific topic?
With a name derived from the term ‘read it’, Reddit strives to be a thorough source of information for its users who come to “read all about it” on their site. The site is broken down into groups termed ‘subreddits’, considered to be different ‘communities’, but essentially being different topics of interest, of which the site has roughly 138,000. Plenty of topics for users to find opinions and information about what they are looking for – whether it’s appropriate content or not.
Reddit is an opinion-based topical conversation website, here’s how it works: each ‘subreddit’ or ‘community’ is controlled by Moderators and Admins; moderators are volunteers of users who desire to watch a subreddit topic, but Admins are paid by the company to monitor the comments and topics. Access is free to the website and even non-users can see the most popular current topics without creating a log in. Ad free Reddit is possible with a subscription. Creating an account will allow any user to comment on a subreddit and add to the discussion, ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ a subreddit, or create a new subreddit on a topic. The votes will determine where that subreddit shows up on the site; the more upvotes, the higher it will appear on the page. The most popular topics will be visible on the page determined by the number of upvotes. The site’s top communities are always changing based on social conversations pertinent to current events; specific searches can be made by anyone for a topic of choice. Moderators and Admins do their best to ensure inappropriate content is removed. Downvoted topics won’t get noticed as fast and will be reported by users if they are inappropriate, but plenty of ‘not safe for work’ content appears within the site and on the app.
Reddit has a diverse user base, though a 2013 research poll discovered most users to be young, men, liberal thinkers, non-white, anti-theist, and uneducated. Passionate is a word that describes all of the users though; and also, ‘philanthropic’, due to the causes the site conjures up donations towards. Many US Presidents have gained support through the chat communities, and awareness to various social causes has increased because of the conversations going on within the site.
To pose the original question to you again, Reader: Would you use Reddit as a source for information? Or is there a more appropriate source for your enlightenment on the subjects you seek knowledge in?
To find out more about Reddit and site the source used in this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
How to protect your family on the app, why it’s flagged as ‘unsafe’ by Protect Young Eyes, and other valuable information about this site:
https://www.protectyoungeyes.com/apps/reddit-parental-controls
Controversy, benefits, and red flags are covered in this article as well:
https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/news-blogs/what-is-reddit-what-parents-need-to-know
*Please note that although we have found valuable information from an external web page for our blog post, we do not endorse all information, religious views, and opinions posted on these third-party websites.