The Internet has evolved a lot in just two decades, since it began to become fashionable and to be in homes around the world, allowing us to discover a new way to find information and entertainment. If you remember those first pages of the late 90s, the forums and platforms that existed in those times, you will surely take your hands on your head because of how everything has changed in these years. social networks have been the main engine of this change, because they have caused the Internet to become the breeding ground for new relationships, both personal and power. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and more recently TikTok and Snapchat are managing to change the face of the network of networks, turning the user into the center of attention and giving them their fifteen minutes of cyber glory.
However, these social networks are too focused on certain global issues, and sometimes also scattered, so that we can waste time looking at our friends’ profiles for hours without really finding anything that interests us . That’s what Reddit is here for, which has become another of the indispensable platforms today on the Internet, curiously based on the way in which the old forums were spread through tabloids in full pages . A topic is chosen, and from there the thread of the conversation is followed with interesting messages, which can be answered and shared by other users. Everyone contributes what they know, and finally, that Reddit thread becomes the place where there is more information on that particular topic , which is wonderful in these times of overinformation.
Reddit history
It was 2005 and, while in another part of the country Mark Zuckerberg was finishing his idea of Facebook, two young MIT students , Alex Ohanian and Steven Huffman , gave life to Reddit, a new website that served as a news aggregator for other Internet sites, and to his vsz, a discussion forum on these topics. A few months later they offered Aaron Swartz to be part of the project to merge it with their own website, Infogami. Swartz, however, would not hesitate for long on board, as months later the Conde Nast publishing house, one of the most prestigious in the world, decided to acquire the site and expel him, keeping the two original founding members. .
In 2008, the platform became open source, as had always been the wish of its founders. In 2011 Reddit became independent from Conde Nast and began to go it alone, when it already reached millions of users. It currently has almost 300 million users, although obviously not all are active. The discussion forums are still the most popular point of the platform, and there are even some that are more than ten years old, and in which we find millions of messages. In 2018, a total design change on the page provoked the anger of users , who showed their disagreement in the polls provided by Reddit. More than 80% of users at that time were against this design change, and the platform had difficult times as the competition is strong, and it may lose its predominant role.
What is Reddit
Basically we can describe Reddit as a news and links aggregator, a platform in which discussion topics are created with the contributions that users make, and that obtain more or less visibility according to the criteria of the community, thanks to the positive or negative votes of the users. It is a well thought out system that also refers to the community’s own responsibility to make Reddit a more common and open site. You can freely participate in the topics, although obviously there are certain limits as to what type of images can be uploaded. Hate messages are also prohibited, although sometimes the platform’s filter is not as effective. It also has a pretty nifty anti-spam system.
Wide variety of content for users
The best thing about Reddit is that you find any kind of conversation and you can talk about absolutely everything on topics ranging from science fiction to erotic photography, through sports, nostalgic series or stories of terror. There are millions of threads open , some more popular than others, of course, and authentic experts who come to Reddit both to study the topics covered on the platform and to contribute his grain of sand, enhancing the work of this website. The content is mostly in English , since a good part of the platform’s users are Anglo-Saxon, and the rest have had to adapt to that language as a “global language” within the platform.
Reddit Gold
The platform has always been free for its users . This means that it costs nothing to open a Reddit account, and we can enter any thread, comment, vote and make all possible decisions within the platform with a totally free account. How is Reddit maintained then? In the same way as other social networks, through advertising . Ads are usually displayed on the side of the page, so they are not usually very intrusive, but they can still be annoying at times. That is why Reddit Gold was created, a paid version thanks to which we obtain different benefits within the platform, such as making advertising disappear.
If we pay for the Gold version of Reddit through its annual or monthly subscription, we will have the right not only to enter the platform without ads or advertising , but also to other advantages, such as seeing more comments on the same page , have a filtering of subreddits and threads from the main page itself, You can also access new functions in beta, being the first to try them. For just $ 29.99 per year, the truth is that the options are not bad at all if you spend hours and hours browsing through the platform, because of course you will never miss content.