Inside Reddit
For those who have Reddit, what do you do with it? Do you just read what people post and comment? Or do you actually join the subreddit Reddit and participate in the discussion?
Reddit is a social platform for people to express their thoughts freely without much stress. What is different from other platforms is the sense of community and mentality. A community is a group of people living in the same place or having common characteristics. A group of people can mean friends or neighborhood, people whom you know of, be able to connect with. On Reddit, however, it’s the opposite. The internet is anonymous, which means nobody can see each other. This also means that they can say anything they want. Unlike other social media, Reddit has the function of upvoting and downvoting users. In some way, it is similar to Facebook, but there isn’t a counter where Reddit can count the number of votes each user has, no matter it’s upvote or downvote. Also, Reddit acts like a discussion forum where a group of people will be joining the discussion in one area but we don’t know who they are because of its anonymity.
Reddit can be a dark community. Think about it, with its anonymity, we can express our own thoughts without having to take any responsibility to anyone. We don’t have to be nice, honest, and even helpful to the person we’re talking to. Repercussions are not necessarily the issue anymore. People who have bad days can just vent on others, and they seem totally fine with it. They’re able to manage their emotions even though they’re being verbally abused. But for some people like me, I feel as if someone stabs me in the back when they don’t play nice. Yes, I know we have the freedom of speech in the community. Yes, I know we can talk freely. Yes, I know there are no repercussions. But that doesn’t mean they can behave badly against others. There is a certain level of tolerance when it comes to the internet. Some people treat it as a joke because they’re more tolerant. For people who are less tolerant to the comments made by commentators they will feel frustrated and stressed. For instance, when someone says something that hurts the others, they will feel as if they have done something wrong, even though they haven’t. Consequently, they will begin to feel upset about it. Some individuals treat things seriously, which can ultimately bring themselves down.
Other than that, users can upvote and downvote posts and comments. When you believe someone is contributing to the conversation and staying on-topic, you can upvote them, which benefits them by increasing their karma. On the other hand, when you believe someone is off-topic, you can downvote them. The reason why it is designed this way is because people want to get the correct information about the questions they ask or concern about. Giving incorrect perspectives may result in spreading misinformation. Therefore, downvoting comments can act as a ‘punishment’ and cause users to lose karma. Others can also downvote you as well if you’re off-topic. Sometimes it’s easy to receive -100 downvotes if people think your answer is wrong. In this case, you can delete your post before losing more of your karma.
Being on Reddit can be unfair sometimes because there is this community called Karma4free. This community is for users who want to gain more karmas if they have very few of them just by asking people to vote for them. This community was illegal before. For some reason, however, someone had ruled out the illegality of the community and started to make it legitimate. The reason why I said it’s unfair is because users can just ask others to vote instead of asking a proper question in a proper community. Despite the unfairness, the community is still popular to users.
A community is not for people to mess around, that’s why people set rules for users to let them know the rules exist. Reddit can ban users if they abuse their votes. For example, in the Karma4free community, if people keep downvoting the posts, they can be banned temporarily for three days. Reddit can be cruel if users don’t follow the rules and regulations.
At the end of the day, people just want to gain some knowledge on Reddit. They don’t mean to cross the line. But humans can be cruel, and they may say something on Reddit that will hurt others unintentionally, as a result of getting reported or even banned. Therefore, we should be careful of what we post there.
