Part 3: Social Bookmarking and Aggregating - Avoiding overload

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reddit is a social bookmarking site than works in a very similar fashion to Digg - basically it is a source for submitting and accessing new and popular content on the Internet. Users submit links to stories, videos or images on the web that they find interesting and other users can then vote either for or against these submissions. The more positive votes a submission gathers, the more prominently it is featured on reddit.

Created by Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Chris Slowe and Jeremy Edbery, reddit’s features are not intricate, and although seemingly limited they let the focus of the site remain on what users want to read. Thanks to this reddit is proving to be a fantastic asset for the online community. The main features of the site include:

Reading - the most popular user submitted links, whether news or merely interesting snippets.
Voting for what you liked/disliked, thus giving articles a higher or lower ranking. The best rated content floats to the top while the less useful submissions sink into obscurity.
Exploring - what the latest and hottest stories are along with what individual reddit users recommend, thus filtering for your individual tastes.
Submitting - your own interesting links for others to comment on. The more submissions a user makes that gain positive votes, the more karma (or voting power/ability to influence the prominence of submissions) that user then attains.
Subreddit - the popular subsections of programming, science and politics.

This karma rating is a powerful feature for reddit as it increases certain members’ standing in the reddit community. A desire to achieve as high a standing as possible is often responsible for users trying to post as much unique quality content as they can and creates a strong aversion to users posting old news or items that may not be well received.

As with Digg, submitting your own stories is frowned upon as it amounts to effectively self promoting, and given a long enough period of time this will be picked up.

Getting Started

Signing up to the reddit community is an extremely easy process. All that’s required is a user name and password. Once this process has been completed, users can start submitting their own links and voting for those that they themselves find useful. The anonymity of a username lets users submit and vote at will without fearing any kind of reputation repercussions. Given a long enough time users will find themselves having an influence on the community – a very powerful and motivating appeal.

The site in itself is not the most attractive, but this lack of intricacy coupled with a comprehensive help section makes using the site extremely easy. The help section goes so far as to provide an example so that users can follow reddit’s instructions without fear of making a mistake. Added to this is also an impressive FAQ section. The site is somewhat difficult to navigate due to the size of the various links and buttons in the navigation bars, but this serves to add emphasis to the content placed on the “What’s Hot” and “New” pages.

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