Reddit Fundamentals
With this module, the aim is to help you understand the terminologies around Reddit and what makes it a unique platform compared to others.
The most important thing that allowed Reddit to work for me was that I was a user of Reddit. I was on the website, lurking, sometimes posting, upvoting/downvoting, saving, sharing things to my wife. The more you start using Reddit as a user, the more you will understand this platform and take advantage of it.
Up/Downvote (Karma)
Other platforms have the concept of emotes such as likes. Reddit has a system of voting where you can upvote something or downvote something. Upvoting is technically for increasing the score of a post or comment because it is relevant to or adds value to the discussion, while downvoting is used in the opposite way when something deters from the discussion. However since people can use it however they want, it is generally used as approval or disapproval.
The amount of points is what's called "karma" — so post karma is how many upvotes a post has, comment karma is how many upvotes a comment has, and so on.
This is useful to us because when we have a lot of upvotes we can potentially boost our visibility by a big margin. However this feature opens up the possibility of forming echo chambers, where people try to farm points by saying popular things and regurgitating existing popular opinions. Then people criticize this behavior and the repeating discussion also starts to include the criticism, to the point where arguments become predictable and cliche.
To us it makes us prone to self-censure, where we don't really say the things we really want to say in fear of downvotes. This is something we will have to constantly work with.
Subreddits
A museum is a place with multiple collections of artwork. Reddit is a website with multiple subreddits of posts. Sort of like, when we look at the Facebook groups feature — Facebook is a website with multiple groups of posts.
Each subreddit has a primary topic. For example /r/funny is obviously for funny posts. But with every general, catch-all community there is a variance in quality, so with different people wanting different sub-flavors of funny they form different subreddits like /r/meirl for self-deprecating humor or relatable situations, /r/therewasanattempt for obvious failures at things, and so on.
For us, we have to think about the trade-off between subreddit size and potential impact. If I'm posting at a subreddit with 3.8M users, I have the potential to reach 3.8M users; but this also means that the possibility of my posts getting buried is equally high. If I'm posting at a subreddit with 5k users, the risk of being buried is very low but at the same time the maximum reach is lower.
Each subreddit also comes with its set of rules. For example in a community like /r/lotr filled with Lord of the Rings enthusiasts, it would be tiring to see the same meme template over and over, so low-effort memes are banned in /r/lotr. However in /r/lotrmemes they are not only allowed but encouraged. It's important to follow subreddit rules — and this is a good segue into ban prevention.
Ban Prevention
Let's think about this from the opposite direction. If I'm running a subreddit about mental health and somebody keeps wanting to farm karma, I don't want them to continue doing that. I can warn them that I'll remove their low-effort posts but they keep doing it. I can either keep playing catch-up with them or I can just ban them from my subreddit.
This is why the subreddit ban system exists. But there are other types of bans:
- Site-wide ban — You won't be able to participate in anything at all. Fortunately this type of ban is not something we have to worry about because it's usually given to bots or accounts that actively promote violence, domestic terrorism, or illegal activities.
- Shadowban — This makes it seem like your account is normal from your perspective; you're able to post, comment, and vote, but the system doesn't reflect anything you do outside of your account.
- Subreddit ban — A specific subreddit's moderators decide you can't participate in their community.
Subreddits are run by mods and mods are humans. Some humans are easy to talk to and will understand you. Some won't, and some will be prejudiced against you. It's important to remember that the landscape of subreddits changes over time, so it's not the end of the world if your favorite subreddit bans you.
Ideally you have a lot of fun on Reddit to gather a community that will center around you to make your own subreddit. By that point you can be the mod and you can do whatever you want. But until then, you have to follow other subreddit rules. Thankfully it's easy to do so because every subreddit has their rules on the right of the subreddit page.
If you feel like you are rightfully banned, it's time to take the L and move on. It's a learning experience. But if you feel like you are banned for an unjust reason, it's important to follow the appeal process instead of trying to make a new account. This kind of activity is called ban evasion and it is easily trackable by system admins.
To appeal to a subreddit's moderators, you can use the direct messaging feature and set the subreddit as a recipient. This will send a DM to the moderators of the sub.