I love reddit!

Four fundamental elements of reddit’s success.

I love reddit*. I spend so much time on it every day; It is easily my favorite website on the internet. I compulsively browse it so much during the day that it has become a problem.

Why is reddit so great? There are too many reasons to list all of them, but I’d venture that the following four are important:

Mechanics — Upvoting, downvoting, and a powerful mod-system all lend itself to higher quality discussion and content than you will find on most other websites.

Community— Partly aided by the mechanics, (shitty community members are downvoted out of sight and out of mind) you see more genuine and helpful interactions between strangers here than anywhere else. In fact I would wager that it is the anonymous nature of the user base that is the driving magic behind this community. Users aren’t under the scrutiny of peers from their own social network(usually), thus there is a sense of freedom and honesty that is absent on Facebook or Twitter.

Content— This ties in a bit with mechanics, but reddit is like a distillery. The more human thought and content you put in , the better the distilled content that comes out the other end. When you've got enough people writing about a topic there is bound to be commentary that you’ll find useful and enjoyable.

Philosophy— I know, I know, this is abstract but bear with me. At the root of Reddit’s glory is the philosophy of the people behind it. Reddit is in a unique position that allows it to avoid a lot of the sketchiness that comes from the pursuit of making money. This relieves some of the pressure that usually pushes companies to make their products worse for the sake of profit. Additionally, the folks at reddit are pro internet and pro privacy and that’s super important in maintaining the trust of your userbase as well as just being great for society in general.

I’m excited to see where reddit will go in the future and I will continue to be an avid lurker in the present! If you love reddit as much as i do, let me know over on twitter — @corydiamand

*reddit is lowercase