How reddit works

PRODUCT & DESIGN

Reddit Originals • July 30, 2014

illustration by /u/duzitickle

It’s been almost three years since we made the last o cial blog post about how reddit works,
so making another post along similar lines is long past due. On an interesting side-note,
reddit’s tra c is now almost 5 times higher than the “staggering” amount referred to in that
post’s opening. Part of our motivation for making this post now was that over 200 subreddits
put up a post titled “reddit 101”in their subreddits on Monday, which was created
collaboratively over the last couple of weeks by a number of moderators of major subreddits.

The single most important thing to understand about reddit (and part of what made the reddit
101 e ort so amazing) is that reddit is not a single monolithic site. It’s a platform for creating
communities, and is made up of thousands of active communities (known as “subreddits”),
which are devoted to all sorts of di erent topics and are created and maintained by regular
users. Other than /r/blog and a few other subreddits for o cial purposes, almost every
subreddit is user-run, with practically no involvement from reddit employees.

Moderators and the subreddits they run

 The (unpaid, volunteer) users that run each subreddit
are known as “moderators”, and can de ne the rules that they want to enforce in their
subreddits. Because of this, some subreddits are fairly free-for-all with very few moderators or
rules, while others can have a very strict set of rules and a large, active moderation team. Some
subreddits even take this so far as to prevent you from posting anything except “Cat.”. Because
the moderation style can vary so heavily between subreddits, you should always try to
familiarize yourself with the rules of a particular subreddit before posting in it. If you visit a
subreddit directly, you can usually nd information about that subreddit’s rules in the sidebar
on the right hand side of the page (or if you use reddit through a mobile app, most apps have a
function for viewing the sidebar).

Moderators are also able to customize the appearance of their subreddits by using CSS, and
many subreddits have done extremely thorough jobs of this, sometimes changing the look of
reddit very signi cantly. Multiple functions that have been built into the site over the years
originated as clever CSS hacks developed by moderators.

A list of the moderators is also available in the sidebar of each subreddit, and you can
recognize o cial posts made by them if their username shows up in green followed by an
“[M]” (mods can also comment normally, they must speci cally choose to distinguish o cial
posts). If you have any questions about a particular subreddit’s rules or suggestions for that
subreddit, you can contact the mods by clicking the “message the moderators” link in the
sidebar right above that list.

Admins and the site-wide rules

“Admins” are the paid employees of reddit, and can

distinguish their o cial posts with a red username and an “[A]” tag. Admins work on many
di erent aspects of reddit and redditgifts, and are generally not involved directly in the
operation of speci c subreddits at all. The exception is when enforcing reddit’s site-wide rules,
which override any individual subreddit’s rules. The site-wide rules are quite minimal, and are
geared towards maintaining the overall health of the reddit platform by disallowing things like
excessive self-promotion, posting personal information, and deliberate disruption or
manipulation of other reddit communities. Violating the site-wide rules can result in your
account (or in more extreme cases, entire sites or subreddits) being banned from reddit.

One of the most common site-wide rules that new users have trouble with is the
one related to excessive promotion or “spamming”. The key thing to understand is, again, that
reddit is a collection of user communities, not a platform for free advertising. Most
communities welcome occasional self-promotion if you also contribute to them actively in
other ways, but very few are amenable to people that are just trying to use the community that
they’ve built as a source for tra c. As it says in our wiki page about guidelines for acceptable
self-promotion, “It’s perfectly ne to be a redditor with a website, it’s not okay to be a website
with a reddit account.”

If you’re primarily interested in promoting to a reddit community without becoming an active

member of it, please look into our self-serve advertising system, it’s quite a ordable and allows
you to target speci c subreddits full of users interested in similar content. Plus, we’re giving
10% of our 2014 advertising revenue to charities chosen by redditors, so advertising on reddit
will help to do good in the world at large as well.

If you need to contact the admins for any reason (such as reporting a user or subreddit
violating the site-wide rules), please refer to the contact page for help directing your question
to the right place.

Tailoring reddit to your own tastes

 When asking people if they have a reddit account, they
often respond with something like, “Nah, I’ve never wanted to submit anything or make any
comments, so I haven’t bothered.” This is the most tractor thing to hear, because it means that
they’re missing out on a huge part of what makes the site so interesting. If you create a reddit
account (which only takes a few seconds and doesn’t require anything except a username and
password), you can customize what you see on the “front page” (when you visit reddit.com) by
subscribing to subreddits that interest you and unsubscribing from those that don’t. If you
don’t have an account, you’ll always see posts from the same set of subreddits (the “default
subreddits”), which are intended to show o some of the subreddits available on the site but
almost certainly won’t actually match up with your speci c interests very well. Many long-time
redditors have built their own custom front pages that don’t include any of the default
subreddits, and are entirely made up of other subreddits that they’ve discovered over their
time on the site.

Once you have a reddit account, you can subscribe to or unsubscribe from subreddits using
the button in their sidebar, or you can visit http://www.reddit.com/subreddits to easily nd a
list of the subreddits you’re currently subscribed to as well as browse through the most
popular subreddits or search for ones related to your interests. There are many other options
available for discovering new subreddits, includingthe explore page, /r/random (takes you to a
random active subreddit), or even through various subreddits that exist solely for the purpose
of nding *other* subreddits, like /r/ ndareddit.

Many users also spend a lot of their time on reddit in /r/all, which is a “fake” subreddit that
shows posts from (almost) all of the subreddits on the site. Users who have a reddit gold
subscription have the ability to lter out speci c subreddits from /r/all, which lets them see
submissions from all subreddits except certain ones that they’re not interested in. Various
other methods of following subreddits you’re interested in exist as well, such as using the
multireddits sidebar to categorize the subreddits that you’re interested in into di erent
collections.

Getting more involved with reddit

Once you’ve created a reddit account and have started customizing what you see on the site,
the next step is usually to start participating. The submissions on reddit are all made by reddit
users, and ranked according to how other users vote on them. So even if you’re not interested
in submitting anything yourself, getting involved in voting on submissions or comments helps
improve the experience for everyone else. Be sure to read through reddiquette, which is an
informal set of guidelines (also written by users) about important values to follow while
participating in the site. Of particular importance is that you should try to upvote things that
might be interesting to others or spark discussion, and downvote things that are o -topic or
don’t contribute to the conversation (not things that you just disagree with).

There are also many subreddits that can help you with getting more involved with the site. If
you have a question about something on reddit you can post it to/r/help, or if you have a
suggestion for something to implement on the site you can submit it to /r/ideasfortheadmins.
If you nd a bug we’d de nitely appreciate it if you posted about it to /r/bugs, or if you like to
keep up with updates made to the site we generally post information about them to
/r/changelog.

There’s always a ton of stu to discover on reddit, whether you’re new to the site or you’ve
been using it for years. We’d love to see the comments on this post include other tips about
using the site, suggestions for speci c subreddits that other people should check out, or
explanations of how you nd new subreddits to visit. And if you have any questions about how
anything on the site works, please feel free to ask.

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