In this tutorial, we'll learn the basics of how to use Reddit, the social media.
Creating an Acccount
If you haven't done so yet, make sure you create an account on Reddit.
An account isn't necessary for reading posts, but it's necessary for making use of other features.
How Reddit Works
Reddit is a bit different from other social media. Elsewhere, users have profile pages where their posts appear on a feed, and you follow them to receive to receive their posts in your home feed. On Reddit, you follow, or rather, "join" communities, called subreddits, or subs.
/r/movies subreddit.Each subreddit is focused on some topic. For example, /r/HollowKnight is focused on Hollow Knight, the game. This /r/ prefix refers to the URL of the subreddit's page, in this case https://www.reddit.com/r/HollowKnight/. Most of the users who joined this subreddit, i.e. the "members" of the subreddit, would be fans of the game, who want to talk about the game with other fans.
Users can post posts to a subreddit. Posts posted on a subreddit appear on the home feeds of every user who joined the subreddit. Although Reddit supports posting to your own profile page nowadays, and following users, almost nobody actually does that. That's because if you post on your profile, you need to grow an audience like in other social media, and using those other social media will make more sense in that case. Meanwhile, if you post on a subreddit, even if you have zero followers and a new account, your posts will be seen by thousands of Redditors who have joined that subreddit.
The posts posted on a subreddit are often called "threads." Originally, Reddit was a link aggregator, which means all posts were links to other websites. As Reddit grew, it started allowing long text posts as well. It didn't support images at first, so a different website was created to host images that were then posted to Reddit as links. This website was Imgur. Today, Reddit supports posts that are a single image, multiple images, a video, or a poll with choices.
On a post, users can post comments (replies). Originally, Reddit's design as such that it was very wide, allowing for text posts with a lot of text. This is exceptional: other social media have designs that make long-form text very difficult to write and read. Reddit was redesigned to look more like other social media, and this redesigned included narrower columns for text posts. It's not as narrow as most social media, but it's still narrower than it used to be. Many users prefer to use Reddit's old design (called "Old Reddit") to have a more text-focused experienced.
In general, comments are text-only. They can't contain images. Some subreddits allow users to post images in comments, but not all of them do.
Comments are threaded, i.e. you can reply to comments such that there is a hierarchy of replies. It's not necessary to mention users by name when replying to them, although it's possible by using the /u/ prefix, e.g. /u/VirtualCuriosities will mention the user whose profile page is https://www.reddit.com/user/VirtualCuriosities/.
In a thread, the term "OP" refers to the original post (i.e. the first post of a thread), or the original poster (i.e. the user who posted it).
Users can't "like" posts on Reddit, but they can "upvote" and "downvote" threads and comments by clicking on arrow buttons next to each post. The total number of upvotes minus the downvotes, also called karma "points" on Reddit, is displayed next to each post. Comments with negative karma are hidden, while comments with more karma appear near the top of threads by default. Similarly, by default threads with a low amount of karma are less likely to appear on the subreddit's front page and on its members' home feeds.
Anyone can create a subreddit on Reddit. On Reddit, "administrators" are Reddit's staff. They're special users. A "moderator" or a "mod" is a subreddit's moderator. They're normal users like you. Each subreddit has a moderator that has ownership of the subreddit and several moderators chosen by this mod who have the ability to delete posts, ban users, and lock threads (preventing users from commenting).
There are no tags or hashtags on Reddit. Instead, threads can be "flaired." The thread's flair is often a category decided by the subreddit's moderators.
Reddit's search is unusable. It's recommended to use Google instead.
It's not possible to create a subreddit with a name that already exists. Subreddits can't have sub-forums inside of them either. Flairs are terrible for categorizing anything. Consequently, you'll often have several subreddits dedicated to the same thing.
For example, most subreddits about something ban memes, which means there will be a meme sub dedicated exclusively to memes about that thing. If /r/HollowKnight has in its rules that memes aren't allowed, one of its members will just create /r/HollowKnightMemes.
It's not possible in practice for users to have moderators of a subreddit replaced if those moderators make unpopular decisions. For example, if users don't like how moderators of /r/art run the subreddit, they can't just create another /r/art with better moderation. They will have to create /r/trueart or /r/art2. Most new users will not visit these subreddits whose names contain qualifiers, regardless of the reason for their existence. They'll just go to the "default" /r/art. This can cause all sorts of friction, specially as Reddit keeps gaining more and more users.
In fact, when you create a new account on Reddit, you will not be able to post in many subreddits at first, because they're configured to not allow users with new accounts or low karma to post threads and/or comment. This is a measure to deal with spam bots and ban-evading trolls.
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