What is a Subreddit?
A subreddit, also called a "sub," is a community on Reddit, a popular social media website.
All subreddits have a URL whose path is /r/<something>. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/ is the URL of the movies subreddit. On Reddit, it's possible to link to a subreddit by typing this path into a text box, e.g. if you type /r/movies it creates a link like: /r/movies. If you see this /r/ syntax being used elsewhere, it's likely a reference to the name of a subreddit.
/r/movies.Subreddits work like forums, being dedicated to topics and subtopics, such as /r/cooking, /r/woodworking, /r/movies, /r/photography, /r/memes, /r/gaming.
Users can post threads to subreddits and other users can post replies (called comments) to those threads. Users can subscribe to a subreddit to be see when new threads are posted in that subreddit in a feed at the homepage of the website.
Any user can create a subreddit. Reddit's staff isn't involved with most of them. The user that creates a subreddit becomes its founder and sole moderator (or "mod"). Mods can create rules for their own subreddits and enforce them as they please. By contrast, the staff enforces site-wide rules, and are generally referred to as "Reddit admins."
You can't create a subreddit with a name that already exists, so it's kind of like usernames, except that nobody is going to join /r/movies2 when /r/movies already exists, so it looks as if there were "official" subreddits simply because someone was quick enough to make those before anyone else thought of it. In general, Reddit doesn't officially endorse any subreddits, except for the ones it makes the "default" subreddits on the platform, which are the subreddits that new users are subscribed to by default when they create an account, such as /r/funny. Because every new user is automatically subscribed to them, they have the highest amount of members and the lowest quality of posts, as there will be too many users posting for too few unpaid moderators to moderate.
The founder of a subreddit can invite other users that post in their subreddit to become mods of the subreddit. The founder can't stop being a mod until they pass the owner privileges to another user. This whole system in which you can't take one of the "default" names unless you inherit it from the current owner has been compared to "landed gentry" by Reddit's CEO1.
Unlike a proper forum website, subreddits can not have "sub-subreddits" in them for subtopics, leading users to create overly specific subreddits in order to separate these subtopics. For example, there is no way to put a subforum for each game in /r/gaming, or for each movie in /r/movie, so every game and every movie has their own subreddit, e.g. /r/HollowKnight and /r/lotr. Furthermore, most subreddits have rules against memes, and you can't make a Hollow Knight subsubreddit in /r/memes either, so you end up with things like /r/HollowKnightMemes.
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