What is Reddit and how does it work?

Reddit is one of the most visited sites on the internet and is now very popular in Germany too. TECHBOOK explains what Reddit actually is and how the site works.

It calls itself full-bodied "The front page of the internet", in German: "The front page of the internet" - and with around 1.6 to 1.79 billion visitors per month , Reddit is actually rightly self-confident, because that puts the page in place 19 of the most visited websites in the world . The portal is also becoming increasingly popular in Germany, with around 3.1 percent of users in December 2020 being German. This makes them the largest Reddit user base after the USA, UK, Canada and Australia in 5th place - and from a non-English-speaking country. This is remarkable because Reddit has a high entry level due to its complicated, nested structure.

Yet the Reddit community often has answers to extraordinary questions that have not been addressed anywhere else. Since it is mainly technology-savvy people who use Reddit, there are many solutions and tips for even the craziest and least-known devices. The site offers a lot more than that. TECHBOOK shows you how to find your way around Reddit.

Tip for Reddit users: Download videos from Reddit using this tool: reddit video downloader with sound

Where does the name "Reddit" come from?

Reddit is a play on words from the phrase “read it”, in German “I've read” - for example: “I read on Reddit”. Reddit users are known as "Redditors".

Reddit is made up of many, small forums

First of all, you should know how Reddit is organized - because Reddit does not consist of a large community, but of many small ones: These are called subreddits and anyone who has already been to a classic Internet forum knows roughly how to imagine subreddits got to. There are countless discussion rooms within Reddit, all of which are devoted to a different area of interest and whose content is provided by the users themselves. There is no superordinate editorial team that manages the content, because the users do that themselves: The users rate links, images, videos or texts that have been uploaded via upvote and downvote - the more upvotes a post receives, the more prominently it is placed in the subreddit.

The front page of Reddit - here you get a mixture of all the subscribed subreddits. If you are not logged in, you will see a set selection.

There is a subreddit for everything

And there is an unmanageable number of these subreddits, because anyone can open their own subreddit. On Reddit, for example, the motto “If it exists, there is also a subreddit for it” has specialized. And so you can find places on Reddit where you can discuss your favorite football club or where funny gifs and videos are exchanged.

By subscribing to subreddits that you like and that correspond to your interests, you can create your very own Reddit, tailored to your personal interests. The website is different for every user and that is one of its great strengths.

This is how subreddits work

Once you've found a subreddit that you like, you can subscribe to it - similar to a channel on YouTube. If you now log in to reddit.com, you will see the front page. All current, positively rated contributions from the subscribed subreddits can be found here on one page.

A post on the front page can look like this example from the r / funny subreddit. The upvotes are displayed at the top link. Names of subreddits always have an “r /” in front, because the names are also part of the URL. This makes it easy to navigate to the subreddit without going through the address field in the browser.

Although Reddit is a predominantly English-language platform, there is also a lot of exciting content for German-speaking users. For one thing, the German community is getting bigger and bigger: r / de now has 269,000 subscribers. That is almost 200,000 more than two and a half years ago.

Reddit is full of automated bots

Numerous bots, i.e. autonomous programs that can interact with users, are circulating on Reddit. Bots search through all or certain subreddits for fixed keywords and then respond to them. A large number of bots are programmed to correct common spelling or grammatical errors in the subreddits. But bots can also provide more information on certain topics, convert units or sometimes just comment on something totally pointless. Users can vote bots up or down in a comment with “good bot” or “bad bot”.

The thing about karma

Reddit has a karma system that is designed to help identify if someone has previous experience in the community. Karma is an approximate evaluation of how many upvotes you have received on posts (“Post Karma”) and comments (“Comment Karma”). Of course, only the votes of others are counted, not your own. According to the FAQ, the conversion of Comment Karma is closer to a 1-to-1 ratio than Post Karma. Many upvotes for helpful, nice or intelligent comments help to increase the karma score faster.