Instead of arguing what Reddit is, it's important to describe the problem the website is able to solve. A news aggregator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator is a desktop software which combines the RSS from different blogs. An RSS feed can come from a traditional newspaper, a blog, a podcast, a youtube channel, an online forum and even from wikis. So there is a need for a central clearing house which is equal to a street market in which customers and suppliers are meeting each other.
The traditional clearing house in the Internet is a fulltext search engine. Google indexes all the blogs and other content and if a user is searching for it, he types in the keyword into the searchbox and gets the result. The problem with Google is, that the websites looks always the same for all requests somebody would ask. One possible answer to the problem is to establish community based search engines: one for finding music, one for finding tech-related information the the third for cooking recipes. The better idea is to invent an intermediate between all the blogs and Google. This intermediate is called a virtual community. The only purpose is to filter information.
The term for such a virtual news aggregator is sometimes called a combined RSS feed, other are calling it a linkblog. Such a website can be generated automatically, or like in the reddit case with handcrafted design. To understand how the overall system works we have to take a look at the traffic, measured by Alexa Internet. There are three sorts of Websites available in the United states:
The normal internet which contains of blogs, repositories and content in general. A layer above the content stands reddit which doesn't provide content but is selecting information and on the highest layer is google which can search in the blogs and in reddit as well. It seems, that this hierarchical system fits well to the needs of customers and providers of information at the same time. Basically spoken, the former frontpage of the Internet (Yahoo) was split up into two sub-URLs: Reddit and Google. The first one is an improved handcrafted realtime newsfeed while the second one is an improved fully automatic search engine.
The funny thing is, that Google has replaced alternative search engines like Altavista, bing or Lycos, while reddit has replaced former social bookmarking websites like digg, Delicious or dmoz.org. To understand why Reddit is important we have to take a look into the blogosphere. The blogosphere is the hidden land in the internet. It contains of millions of websites created by individual amateurs which are not connected to each other. It is a rare exception that a blog is created by more than a single author. This results into the question: how are forming these million of blogs a community? And here comes Reddit into the game. Reddit is in contrast to Wordpress not a blogging service, but allows to build a webring. This is a collection of topic specific blogs by a community.
The internal rules of Reddit prevents, that the quality of these URL lists become weak. That means, if a single authors posts 100 spam links in a single post, he gets banned quickly from the site. As a result, only high quality webrings are possible which will increase the traffic of the linked blogs. And at the same time, the reddit readers finds the service useful because they get under the same surface all the content they like. If someone is browsing to a subreddit he gets access to the content of thousands blogs which are linked from this group.
The combination of Google plus Reddit is the street market of the internet. It is a high traffic place in which content providers and content readers are meeting each other and interchanging information. This central hub will become important in a future, in which classical hubs like the bookstore, the library or the offline newsstand become obsolete.
Example
I'd like to give a concrete example. By myself i have also a nice weblog. This isn't a very exciting news because many million people in the world have his own blog. So the question is how to get subscribers for the blog. The answer is a bit disappointing, because it is not possible. Why should a reader subscribe my blog and not the blog of somebody else? The problem what all single author blogs have in common is that the number of postings is low, the number of traffic is low and they potential reader doesn't find what he is searching for. The problem is not located in a certain blog itself, but what is missing is a higher authority on top of similar blogs which is collecting all the information.
In the classcial internet this higher instance was called a webring. It was a website aggregator which put many smaller blogs together to a large blog-network. The idea of a webring was developed further to modern reddit like websites. They are doing the same functionality combined with modern techniques like RSS, reputation systems and embedded images.
Troll the reddit site
One question remains open: how can somebody post something on reddit which allows him to have fun with the moderators. This task is more difficult than trolling a normal website. The problem with reddit is, that it doesn't provide content but it's a linkblog. By definition a news aggregator website stands above the normal internet. This makes it hard to use irony in a creative way. One option to troll reddit, is to build it's own news aggregator similar to digg. One linkblog is able to make jokes against the second linkblog. But doing so is a labor intensive task. Selecting all the content by hand and decides which of the users gets upvotes is a challenging task so my guess that there is no easy way to watch down to reddit and know everything better than this website. I would guess, that search engines like Google can do so, because Reddit sees only a part of the internet but not the complete one.
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