A beginner’s guide to Reddit
Reddit has recently risen to prominence in search rankings. We explain why, and explore what this social media site has to offer
We all have our own definitions of social media, but some are narrower than others.
To many people, social media starts and ends with so-called dinosaurs like Facebook and X, or Twitter as it will always be known to many former users.
Fewer people would cite messaging apps such as Telegram or WhatsApp as social media sites, though by any official definition, they are.
Even fewer would name LinkedIn as a social media platform, let alone Reddit.
Indeed, Reddit has flown under the radar of many consumers until a recent Google algorithm change began to prioritise Reddit content in search results.
Yet Reddit is undoubtedly a social network. It’s described by its founder as “a network of communities”, where people can discuss almost any topic that isn’t too extreme.
A few numbers
Reddit was founded twenty years ago in California, and its popularity might come as a surprise to the uninitiated.
The world’s ninth-most visited website has received over 22 billion posts and comments to date, with 110 million people visiting the main site or accessing its mobile apps every day.
They do so to talk – either by starting new conversations or responding to existing ones – about topics ranging from politics and album artwork to food preferences and collectables.
Conversations are grouped together in user-created boards known as subreddits.
Some topics receive remarkable levels of engagement; a USB-C cable subreddit attracts 250 million weekly visitors, as does an Insects thread catering to bug enthusiasts.
There are UK-specific communities covering DIY, legal advice, personal finance and news. However, conversations about politics are generally best avoided here, as elsewhere.
If an existing subreddit (conversation) isn’t already in existence, you can create one by posting anything from text and photos to hyperlinks and videos.
Other users can then reply or vote on the original comment and any follow-ups, with every response offering upvote and downvote (thumbs up or thumbs down) functionality.
Replies attracting more upvotes are displayed more prominently in the order of responses, since they’re perceived to contain greater value, humour, relevance – or useful information.
Indeed, Reddit’s role as a Wikipedia-style font of knowledge led Google to increase its ranking performance in 2024 since Reddit was deemed to offer “helpful content”.
(The $60 million partnership struck between Reddit and Google earlier in 2024, allowing the latter to train its AI models on the former’s content, is surely just a coincidence).
Behind the scenes
As with any free-to-use service, revenues are generated through other methods. And like its social media competitors, Reddit offers companies a variety of advertising opportunities.
It claims to engender higher levels of trust in products and services discussed on its site than other social platforms – or even Google.
Quite apart from Google’s AI deal, a new Reddit Answers service uses an AI bot to generate bespoke summaries of previous conversations when a specific search string is entered.
Reddit Answers is currently available in nine countries including the UK, Malaysia, Canada and Singapore, which gives a hint as to the platform’s global coverage.
Reddit itself has offices everywhere from London to Australia, while posts can be translated into eight languages including Swedish and Spanish.
Getting started
The best way to learn about any platform is to create an account and experiment, and signing up to Reddit is no harder than any other social media outlet.
The homepage displays popular subreddits, which are all prefixed with r/ to identify them as Reddit-specific.
It’s possible to subscribe to subreddits, in which case recent content or significant updates will also appear on the homepage when you log in.
Some material is age-restricted, while starting a new thread may require you to have earned reputation points – known as karma – to prevent bots trawling the site or automatically posting junk comments.
Unpaid moderators enforce rules and remove comments in breach of those rules, while paid administrators add an extra layer of supervision to conversations.
