Browsing and reading articles on reddit

- To get familiar with how reddit works, let's start with a quick introduction to reading posts on reddit. This is the reddit homepage, and you can find it at www.reddit.com. Reddit is a giant community where people can share information or links to other websites. We can see several of those posts listed here on the front page. Each one of these items has been posted to reddit by some person because they found it interesting or because they want to promote something by making it visible to the reddit community.

Any reddit user can post any content to reddit at any time. So be prepared to see pretty much anything and everything posted to reddit. If somebody found it interesting, it might be there. Now reddit is composed of lots of categories, known as subreddits. Each subreddit is a place where links can be posted that relate to a specific focused topic, but that's not what we're looking at here. On the front page you see links that have been shared to reddit, completely unfiltered by that category organization.

Naturally, we'll talk about subreddits later in this course, but since the front page is not filtered by topic, you should expect to see a vary wide range of content. Since anybody can post any content to reddit at any time, how do they determine what shows up on the front page? Well, reddit has a system that sorts postings according to the most popular recent posts. Registered reddit users are able to upvote or downvote any posting. If more users upvote a post, it becomes more popular and rises to the top.

Lots of downvotes will bury a post, so it will be less likely to rise up to the top of that list. You can see the ranking for each post right next to it, which is identified by this number. There's also the up arrow or the down arrow. If I was logged in to my reddit account, I could vote up or down on any of these postings, which would change the overall number, which would change its ranking and would sort it differently. So over time a post will descend in the rankings, to be replaced by newer popular postings.

When you see something that you're interested in, and you want to see more you can just click on the headline. To oversimplify a bit, there are really two types of postings. There are links to something else on the web, like this one, where if I click on it, it just loads up a link to a webpage, and in this case, it takes me to this article about this mysterious meteorite impact. I'll take a step back. And then, of course, the other type of content are links to original postings here on reddit. These are text-based posts, and this is a good example here.

I can click on this, and it's just some text that somebody put in. This is just a question. "When we grow older and acquire tastes, do our tongues change physically, or is it all in our head?" And then there's going to be a whole bunch of comments here, where people are carrying on the conversation, trying to answer the question. These comments are where other reddit posters can post their thoughts or reactions to the original posting. Now the demeanor and propriety of these comments can vary wildly. Some are kind and supportive, while some are cruel and rude.

Remember, you're dealing with an unfiltered, uncensored, and mostly anonymous community here. I'm going to take a step back again. Now links to content outside of reddit do have that comment space as well. You just don't see it when you click on the main link in the headline, because that main link takes you to somewhere else outside of reddit. But under each of these headlines there should be an option here for the comments, and if I click on that, then I can see all of the comments associated with that external link.

So that's the core to browsing content on reddit. Not really difficult. Just click around and check out what looks interesting. We'll be building on these basics as we continue on.