Show Redditors you’re real!
This week we are making Reddit integration publicly available on Credo360.
First a quick description of reddit; If you haven’t been living under the internet rock for the last 10 years, you can safely tl;dr the next paragraph.
Reddit is a social media aggregator community, consisting mostly of anonymous users. There are sub-communities organized around a particular topic called subreddit’s. For example on a subreddit called “Entrepreneur” you may find topics related to starting and operating a business. Redditors (users of reddit) can start a reddit post, such as “How do I form a C Corporation in Delaware” and other redditors can comment on that post with their expertise. Each person can up-vote or down-vote other individuals comments and the post itself.
The benefit of having a community consist entirely of anonymous users is that it encourages free speech. The detriment is that everyone is a stranger and it is not easy to validate that they are who they say they are. For example, a typical format of posts on reddit is “I am so-and-so and Ask Me Anything (AMA).” Unfortunately, since it takes only 30 seconds to create a reddit account, it’s pretty tough to validate if someone claiming to be a specific person is, in fact, that person. The existing process is for the AMA poster to privately message the moderators of subreddit, and send them proof of their identity. The “verification” process can be very time consuming, easily manipulated, and isn’t always transparent. This is where Credo360 comes in.
People can establish their identity on Credo360 by validating their public data, social media accounts, and other forms of identification. Starting this week, they can also link their reddit account to their profile. They can then send the moderators a link that shows their reddit name correlation to their “real-life” name and reputation. So now if I wanted to do an AMA, I could just message a moderator of a subreddit, and tell them “My name is Yanni Shainsky and I’m a co-founder of Credo360, and I would like to do an AMA, here’s my Credo360 profile https://www.credo360.com/reddit/yanni, can you please verify me?”
Another way to use Credo360 is for “bartering” subreddits. For example, one subreddit is called “/reddit/BeerTrade”. That community allows its members to exchange beer, and mostly works on an honors system. Because Credo360 has the ability for people to rate and review each other, the moderators of “/reddit/BeerTrade” could recommend that all traders register with Credo360. Before making a trade with someone, the parties would check each other’s Credo360 reputation. They can then discuss the details of the trade using our built-in chat, and ultimately leave a review of their experience with the other person.
This is our first stab of making Credo360 useful for redditors and we could use any feedback we can get. If you can suggest any features that we’re lacking, a subreddit that would benefit from our services, or another anonymous site that we should consider integrating with, please send us a note.
