[hr] Until a few months ago, people were used to overlook Reddit and say that it was nothing more than an ‘ugly’ version of Digg, then Digg decided to ‘revamp’ its design and suddenly, Reddit stopped looking so awful. Was this a strike of luck?, we honestly doubt it; it’s a fact that while Digg focused its attention on creating a Facebook-like interface, Reddit decided to stay focused in its community and the contents, which is probably the main reason why so many people have migrated to this site.

Reddit guides have already been written, but most of them utilize tons of intricate terms that just make them useless for the average user, so what we decided to do is grab all the information possible about this site and chew it a little bit to create an user-friendly guide, the results are now served on the table and we invite you to read this unofficial Reddit guide that will help you understand better this place.

So, what is Reddit?

OK, we know this might seem like a silly question for most of you, but it’s probable that more than one person that has decided to read this article has no clue of what Reddit is about, we’ll try to keep it brief. Reddit (as many others did), started back in 2005 inside the head of two college students, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman (who probably realized from that moment that Digg was not the future :P), the project slowly began to grow until it became what it is these days. To describe Reddit in a few words, it is a site where people can submit contents from the internet and/or contents of their own, then the users (known as redditors) vote up or down these contents and hence the publications that receive the biggest reception eventually make it to the frontpage. Reddit features a series of sections known by most people as ‘subreddits’, these sections help people filter contents according to their preferences and also submit contents to a niche that will enjoy the publication more than the rest.

Funny note: Reddit’s name is a slang for ‘Read It’.

Reddit’s structure

Now that you’ve decided to create your Reddit account, let’s take a look at the site’s frontpage and what’s the function of every element that you can find:

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This is your personal (and usually) favorite subreddits’ bar, you will find the bar already filled by default with some of the trendiest subreddits, however you can change it anytime you want. These 4 tabs will help you browse through reddits. The ‘what’s hot’ section corresponds to the known Digg’s ‘Top News’ section, which means that this is where you’re going to find the most popular reddits in real time. The next tab we have is ‘New’, this section features all the latest reddits distributed in two sections, one features all reddits sorted by date, which means that all your reddits will eventually hit the frontpage of this part, the other tab is named ‘rising’ and it features those upcoming reddits that are getting closer to the frontpage. Then we have ‘controversial’, this section displays all those reddits that though they could be featured on the frontpage, their content is not the fittest for all audiences and therefore it is placed here. Next to ‘controversial’ we find ‘top’, which is an useful section to help browse throughout all the most popular reddits, you can display the most popular reddits of the hour, of the day, the week, the month, the year or all time. Finally we find ‘saved’, which is basically your personal store and where all the reddits that you have saved can be accessed at any time. For those with some extra bucks in their pockets, this is the place where all sponsored reddits are shown, you can support the Reddit community and at the same time promote your products or contents. Unlike the previous item, this is not a reddit itself, just pure advertisement hahaha, what were you expecting to find on this point :P?. The ‘submit button’ will take you to the submission window, where you can publish a link or a content, on top of the ‘submit’ button we find the ‘search bar’, which is very helpful to find specific reddits. This button should be easier to notice, we personally did not see this button until a while after beginning our life as redditors. The edit button will take you to the page where you can edit your subreddits bar and leave only the ones you’re interested the most. You can look for specific subreddits or check the ones the site shows you by default, you must click on the ‘-frontpage’ button to remove a subreddit from the bar and on the ‘+frontpage’ button to incorporate it to the toolbar. This is Reddit’s main section, here you’re going to find all the most relevant reddits of the moment, clicking on the title will take you to the original link or if it doesn’t have one, then you will be taken to that reddit’s page. On Reddit’s footer you can access to additional options such as ‘Reddit Gold’, ask for help, find useful tools, read more about the authors, check related pages and more.

Start redditing

Before we start with the whole ‘redditing’ process, it’s super important for you to check ‘Reddiquette’, an unofficial but yet the most complete set of guidelines that will teach you what to do and what not to do in Reddit in order to become a positive member of the community and not end up being banned as it has happened to many people. Now let’s begin for the basics, once you have applied for a Reddit account, probably the first thing you want to do is submit, to do this you can either have a link you consider interesting or you can simply enter a text with a message or something that might become relevant for the community. But before you proceed with the submission, we consider important that you configure your subreddits bar and get familiarized with it, this will help you determine the fittest subreddits for your submissions, click on the ‘Edit’ button (item number 6 of our graphic) and let’s begin.

Once you’ve hit the ‘Edit’ button, the following window is going to show up on your desk, let’s take a look before we continue with the explanation.

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These tabs will let you browse between the trendiest subreddits, those that have been recently created and finally, the subreddits that you’ve created, you’re subscribed to or have any connection with. Using the search bar will allow you to look for specific terms in case you know exactly what you’re looking for. This red button is the ‘-frontpage’ button that we talked about before, clicking on it will remove the corresponding subreddit from your subreddits bar. On this box you can visualize the subreddits that are currently nesting on your subreddits bar, clicking on the ‘-frontpage’ button will let you get rid of them. This is an example of a subreddit that is currently outside of the bar and that you might be interested in, if you consider that a specific subreddit is worthy of becoming part of your subreddits bar, just click on the ‘+frontpage’ button to immediately incorporate it.

Subreddits map by Karmanaut – Click to enlarge

Now that you’re acquainted with Reddit’s subreddits and how to work with them, you can proceed with your first submission, so let’s go back to the submit window.

Select if you want to submit a link or just enter some content manually. You can submit links from other sites or from your own webpage. On this field you must type down the name of your post, make sure that the title is attractive enough to make redditors vote for it. The URL of your post, it will be handy if you place the exact link of the article / resource instead of the homepage or something similar just for SEO purposes. This is where you’re going to apply the previous lesson of this guide, on this field you can select the specific subreddit where your publication is going to appear, you must assess this point carefully to guarantee the highest success possible to your post. Finally the CAPTCHA, this is just a security measure from the Reddit team to keep spammers away. Below the CAPTCHA field you’re going to find the ‘submit’ button, which is basically the final step prior launching your post to the reddit sphere.

Making it to the frontpage

One of the main reasons behind Reddit’s success is that it cannot be tricked as easy as other networks thanks to its strong and supportive community, which means that we won’t be giving you any hacks or cheats that will make you jump instantly to the frontpage, instead of that we’re going to talk about all the good practices that will increase your karma and therefore will get you closer to the frontpage.

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This is the Reddit’s vote system and one of its biggest advantages in front of other networks where there’s no chance of giving a negative vote to a post. You can only vote once, though you can cancel your vote at anytime and then vote again. On the right side we find this blue box with all your reddit’s information, including time of submission, earned positive / negative points and the short link, this last element is very useful for those cases where you want to share your post with somebody but at the same time you want to give that person the chance of voting without having to visit Reddit itself. Below the blue box you can find the subreddit where the content was submitted, this is very useful to help you check how other people is managing their reddits.

There’s no real science behind Reddit, this is one of the most honest networks around and that’s why we love it so much (yes we know the design is not the best, but who cares?). Now regarding your submissions, there are some points that you might not know about, so here’s a short list to help you go through this:

During the first hours after submitting a post, a dot symbol will appear instead of the score, this was intentionally established by Reddit’s team to keep things down to earth during the first hours and prevent a bandwagon effect.

this was intentionally established by Reddit’s team to keep things down to earth during the first hours and prevent a bandwagon effect. You cannot change a reddit’s name once you have completed the submission process, the only thing you can do is delete it asap and re-submit it.

the only thing you can do is delete it asap and re-submit it. Usernames can be changed and will maintain the earned karma, however you cannot migrate earned karma points to a different username.

Every reddit can be removed from the frontpage by moderators as well as comments or spam links.

as well as comments or spam links. If you create a subreddit, you automatically become the moderator. If you want to become moderator for another subreddit, you need to contact the current moderators.

Essential Reddit links and tools

On this final section we want to list some of the dandiest tools and links that can enhance your Reddit experience considerably, you will find a quick description along with the original link:

Userstyles

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Probably when we said before that no one care about Reddit’s design as long as it fulfills its function, more than one put a ¬¬ look hahaha. The truth is that we were teasing you because we found this awesome section inside userstyles.org with tons of sleek themes to prettify Reddit with ease. The themes are installed as a Firefox extension and will not affect the site’s performance, they will only make Reddit look better.

Reddit bookmarklets

Useful resource for Redditholics. This link shows you the essential Reddit bookmarklets that you must always keep in your bookmarks bar

Reddit buttons

One of the cleverest ways of connecting your site with the Reddit community is adding a custom button in your site. These social buttons help people submit your content to Reddit instantly and begin the discussion, besides, the buttons are pretty cool, so they won’t mess up your site.

Reddit Blog

On the official Reddit blog you can keep up with the latest development updates, community announcements, check out the newest plugins and just find everything you might need to improve your Reddit experience.

Reddit Gold

In every network, social club, sorority, etc … there’s always a special group that only a few people know about and even less belongs to, on this case we’re going to name it Reddit Gold. By purchasing a gold account in Reddit you obtain access to several features that will make you feel like the spoiled child among redditors hahaha.

Metareddit

Metareddit is an useful website where you can follow several subreddits, arrange them by utilizing tags and even vote up or down. You can think of this as an extension to help you leverage all the best from Reddit.

Socialite

Think of this as the StumbleUpon toolbar but for Reddit. The toolbar integrates smoothly with Mozilla Firefox by implementing a subtle button on your URL bar that by clicking on it activates the whole Socialite toolbar. Using this toolbar allows you to vote, save and hide links without accessing Reddit itself. This is definitely a must-have tool for those who spend a lot of time redditing.

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I’m not sure of how this work, apparently is a lite version of Reddit that can be implemented as a bookmarklet and displays all the most important reddits from the top 100 subreddits with additional features.

Threaddit

Threaddit is a bookmarklet that enhances the way you browse Reddit threads, this tool is specially useful for people who is always keeping an eye over the latest reddits. The tool has been tested in Firefox, Chrome in Opera though it might work just fine in other browsers.

Reddit Reveal

This Firefox bookmarklet grabs Reddit and strips it down in a blink of an eye, leaving exposed the up/down votes for comments, user’s age in days, vote score for upcoming votes and many more great things.

Imgur

Finally we have Imgur, an useful website where people can share images with ease with their friends and relatives as well as on message boards and blogs. The site also offers an intuitive system to edit the uploaded pictures before sharing them in popular sites such as Digg or Reddit.

Hush Hush: Although we haven’t personally tried this, some people say that an effective way of increasing your chances of making your way up to Reddit’s frontpage is submitting a couple of images from Imgur that possess some relation with the content you want to share, once you have submitted these pictures, you can go ahead and share your article with the community. As we said before, this is just a rumor, so don’t take this for granted.

Final thoughts

Well folks, we have reached the end of this self-acclaimed Reddit guide. Although we are aware that there are a bunch of other useful tools and resources, our main goal was to join together all the essentials to help you become an advanced redditor; we are not planning to share snares and shortcuts to help people leverage Reddit for SEO purposes, as we consider Reddit to be one of the greatest networks nowadays where people can still decide what’s important and what’s not and actually give information the valor that it deserves; to conclude, these are the golden rules that will definitely help you out become a Reddit expert:

Enjoy redditing, there are plenty of handy resources waiting for being discovered.

Don’t spam, that will only take you to a banned ending.

Become a good element for the community by sharing quality content and commenting on people’s submissions.

Forget about Digg.