How reddit works

illustration by /u/duzitickle

It's been almost three years since we made the last official blog post about how reddit works, so making another post along similar lines is long past due. On an interesting side-note, reddit's traffic 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 effort 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 different topics and are created and maintained by regular users. Other than /r/blog and a few other subreddits for official 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 define 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 find 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 significantly. 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 official posts made by them if their username shows up in green followed by an "[M]" (mods can also comment normally, they must specifically choose to distinguish official 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 official posts with a red username and an "[A]" tag. Admins work on many different aspects of reddit and redditgifts, and are generally not involved directly in the operation of specific 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 traffic. As it says in our wiki page about guidelines for acceptable self-promotion, "It's perfectly fine 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 affordable and allows you to target specific 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 off some of the subreddits available on the site but almost certainly won't actually match up with your specific 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 find 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, including the explore page, /r/random (takes you to a random active subreddit), or even through various subreddits that exist solely for the purpose of finding *other* subreddits, like /r/findareddit.

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 filter out specific 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 different 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 off-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 find a bug we'd definitely 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 stuff 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 specific subreddits that other people should check out, or explanations of how you find new subreddits to visit. And if you have any questions about how anything on the site works, please feel free to ask.