Reddit is one of many up and coming forum sites that allow people to connect on millions of endless topics that allow its users to remain completely anonymous. This is both good and bad. Reddit I think is one of the better sites but anonymity allows for some really hateful things to come out which is the tradeoff for the good. Small nice communities that couldn’t exist without the internet have formed uniting people who share those small nice interests. Some believe this sort of thing is uniting us and being able to find at least one other person if not thousands out there in the world that might have that same strange interest as you/. In a way no one’s alone but the consumption of so many niches could also fragment us. I haven’t really decided where I stand on that debate but using reddit was definitely a surprising and interesting experience.
The first homepage you come to on reddit is supposedly through complicated algorithms, likes and comments from the public the most talked about popular stuff out there. It’s the news, conversations, and entertainment people are most interested in. Being able to see what most people on the internet find to be stuff worth seeing is pretty interesting, at times disappointing. I suppose I found it surprising at how high up on the list some of the stupidest stuff is. At the moment some of the top links are fancy grilled cheese recipes, an article about a moth that doesn’t eat and lives about a week, and beautiful pictures of a sunset in England. All interesting positive things and I understand why they rise to the top of the list but accompanying these sorts of links are also gifs of people falling, really bad dirty jokes, and stupid memes. Not that these things are necessarily bad but it’s just that I was hoping for a few more serious things such as breaking news or politics. I know that there are subreddits for specific things but I was expecting a higher level of interest in more important things. It really to me ended up being amusing at time but for the most part a big waste of time. I know that sounds like I dislike the site and I don’t, it just actually is what you would do if you wanted to waste some time.
I spent a good amount of time taking a look around the site. I spent the most time on a Seinfeld subreddit, a Jimi Hendrix one, some ones pertaining to currant news, harry potter, and one of the best ones in my opinion; food. To be honest I wasn’t that excited to do this assignment because I felt as if I was just wasting time going around looking at the site but an hour and a half later I’m still messing around laughing at half the stuff that comes up so it ended up being more entertaining than I thought. It took me longer than I thought it would because it’s like, when do I stop messing around and write about what I had experienced
Something I appreciated about this site that I didn't like about 4chan is that you have to dig a little bit deeper for explicit content. It seemed like any forum you went to on 4chan had sexual or pornographic gifs and weird misogynistic comments about whatever the hell people wanted to say. On Reddit since thee links get voted up and down and obviously explicit conversations aren’t going to be at the top of the list minimizing how often you’d see rude comments. On top of that they have some way in moderating how relevant peoples comments are also minimizing rude comments on different subreddits. For example I was messing around when I first got it and posted some really stupid irrelevant comment under one of the food subreddits about grilled cheese. The site removed my comment almost immediately and wouldn’t let me post anything for another fifteen minutes all in all it was a much better experience than expected I found myself on it a few hours later wasting time. I’m not sure but we might have created yet another reason Ill stay up all night doing homework.
