What do you look for in a social media network? In my view, the definition is pretty simple: You should be able to choose topics and accounts that interest you, and easily check in on them whenever you open your network. That was the original promise of so many networks: Facebook would connect you to your friends, new and old; Instagram would show you those people’s photos; and Twitter would deliver you funny, interesting, and important updates from anyone you wanted.
That’s how it started, but social media networks are in a bad place these days: X (formerly Twitter) isn’t even safe to use anymore; Meta lets AI run rampant on Facebook, and it’s difficult to get Instagram to show you content from your friends.
If you’re looking for a social network that actually sticks to the promises the platforms sold us on, Reddit, I argue, is one of the last good ones. That doesn’t mean it’s great.
It’s all about the subreddits
The thing that has always made Reddit stand out from the pack is its subreddits. There is a subreddit for virtually any interest or topic you can think of, big or small. If you’re passionate about Calvin and Hobbes, there’s a subreddit of over 700,000 other people who want to talk about the comic, too. If you love coffee, you can have your pick between subreddits like r/espresso (555,000 subscribers) or r/keurig (6,900 subscribers). (I’m telling you, there’s a subreddit for everything.) Reddit says there are over 100,000 active communities on the site, and some estimates put the total number of subreddits at north of three million. You may start out following a subreddit that covers a general topic (r/music), then decide to follow smaller subreddits that focus on specific niches (r/futurebeats, r/indieheads, r/blackmetal).
Because there are so many focused interests on the site, chances are there have been conversations about topics and questions you currently want the answers to. That’s why many of us add “Reddit” to the end of our Google searches: Someone else also had their iCloud settings grayed out, and they know how to fix it; New Yorkers will help you figure out how to get from LaGuardia airport to Manhattan by public transit; and this gamer will show you how to make sure you’re always playing the PS5 version of a cross-platform game. The amount of shared knowledge on the site is staggering, and because the focuses are often so niche, you’ll find a lot of useful information across a wide variety of topics. (We will return to this topic, before you run to the comments to roast me.) Of course, not all the subreddits are for serious interests, either. There are plenty of subreddits dedicated to the lighter side of life (ahem, memes). You can curate this side of Reddit to your liking as well, but, er, exercise caution.
Once you set up your Reddit account with all your various interests, the “front page of the internet” starts to come into view. You open reddit.com, and you find new articles, posts, and discussions based on the things you want to see. It’s remarkable how similar the experience is today as it was years ago: This CGP Grey video about the site from roughly 10 years ago is still largely accurate.
Reddit is far from perfect
Reddit is good, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect (or even great). The site certainly isn’t X, and doesn’t have hate speech leaking in from all sides, but there are still plenty of communities where the conversations are, let’s say, unproductive. In many ways, curating your Reddit feed makes a huge difference (I experience zero X-quality hate comments in my daily Reddit experience), but it is a concern, and something to look out for. To be fair, the site has come a long way in cracking down on terrible subreddits and communities over the years. (It used to be so bad.)
Reddit has a massive user base (about 73 million daily active users) which means the larger communities are truly enormous—and notoriously bad. (r/funny is anything but.) If you join the site and only check out the default subreddits they offer, you’ll likely quit, and wonder what the hell the Reddit hype is all about. The same advice that worked for the site 15 years ago still applies today: Delete the bloated, default subreddits, and curate a list of smaller yet active subreddits that fit your needs. Whether or not those subreddits are run well depends on the communities’ individual moderators, who voluntarily manage their subreddits. While that means the quality of subreddits—and the moderators themselves—dramatically varies, when you do find a subreddit that is well-managed, remember to be nice to your mods.
r/funny’s number one rule
Credit: Jake Peterson
But even when the discussion seems high quality and in good faith, you should always take them with a grain of salt, especially concerning important information. Just like any other place on the internet, Reddit is full of anonymous randos who may or may not know what they’re talking about. It’s fine for learning a new hack about your smartphone, or to figure out a transit question, but don’t believe everything you read about things like science, history, or, most importantly, health. (Reddit is not your doctor.)
I’m also not a fan of many of Reddit’s corporate decisions. The site raised its API rates to ridiculous levels, forcing most third-party apps to shut down (RIP Apollo). The site’s app, by comparison, is far less intuitive and fun to use, and the current site design is polarizing. Luckily, there are some third-party clients sticking around, and if you don’t like “new” Reddit, old.reddit.com works just fine. But perhaps worst of all, the company is working on selling your data to companies to train AI models. It’s…not great, and I hope it changes, but Reddit hasn’t shown much care in the opinions of its user base lately.
Reddit is imperfect, but it’s also what you make of it. The site is still a fantastic resource for communities of like-minded interests, and is about as engaging as ever. Plus, that enormous user base means that the site is a lot more successful at what it does than some of the new players entering the scene. There are other promising platforms out there to try (namely Mastodon, but also Bluesky and Threads), but it’s tough to beat the benefits of Reddit’s popularity. It’s difficult to find a topic that isn’t covered by a subreddit. If you do, make one yourself, and you might just find a small community forming around it.
Reddit has some wind in its sails this week: The company’s stock was up 48% following the first day of its initial public offering, and while that number came down a bit the second day, it seems the markets like Reddit as a stock. It even opened up the IPO to Redditors themselves, which was a decent gestures towards the people that actually make Reddit valuable. Personally, I hope Reddit’s strategies are successful, so long as they continue to allow us to connect in our communities without too much interference.
