Whats up with Reddit?

Everyone has their favorite social media. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and countless other sites and apps give us our daily dose of news, entertainment, and updates on the lives of our friends and families. One site I have come to use quite often is the site Reddit.

Reddit claims itself to be the "front page of the internet" and does a pretty good job holding that title up in my opinion. When you open Reddit for the first time you are greeted with posts and articles from every corner of the internet and every interest imaginable. You can subscribe to "subreddits" which are concentrated on specific topics and serve to bring all the news regarding these topics into one location. Subreddits range from normal things like sports, politics, and finance to the downright weird ones like r/WtWFotMJaJtRAtCaB which is a subreddit dedicated to pictures of water flowing over a milk jug and creating a bubble, hence the name "When the Water Flows over the Milk Jug at Just the Right Angle to Create a Bubble."

The beauty and the beast of Reddit lies in the reliance on the community. Members in the site are the ones who create, moderate and contribute to subreddits. This can lead to very interesting and well put together groups that contain members from all corners of the globe and all walks of life. You can sort Reddit in a number of different ways, one of which is the "Original Content" or "OC" sorting. OC is content that is made by the user who posts it, rather than a repost of old content or use of another person's content. Sorting with the OC filter allows you to see some really creative pieces of work. One of my favorite subreddits to find OC on is r/dataisbeautiful, which includes charts, graphs, and visuals that outline an interesting or "beautiful" set of data that has been collected. One such example of this is a chart that was a record of every half-hour of the user u/aeroreo's 2018. The graph was color-coded and showed what the user was doing at the top and halfway mark of every hour of the day for 365 days. Endless amounts of this type of content can be found from music to paintings to 3D printing. The creative ability of the human being is truly on display for the rest of the world to see.

With every good, there comes a bad, however. Reddit is no exception to this. Many controversial subreddits have spawned since the site was created in 2005. From communities that are overly vulgar or distasteful to some that were down-right illegal, Reddit has seen its share of controversy. Reddit has banned most of the controversial communities at some point, but usually, these dark areas of the internet saw press and media coverage before action was taken against them. As with the previously mentioned communities, these banned communities were also "moderated" by Redditors but those "mods" weren't the ones taking action because often they were contributors to the subreddit. Reddit handles these issues as they arise and ban users who have had a history of issues or suspicious activity from their site by banning their specific IP address. Some people may cry out against Reddit banning their accounts or IP, but is it a 1st Amendment violation? The fact in the matter is no, it's not. Reddit is a private company who has free reign over the administration of their site.

Reddit in my mind is everything right and wrong with the Internet. There is an inherent beauty but also a very ugly and dark side. You will hardly ever if ever at all, see the ugly side unless you go searching for it. Reddit clearly marks NSFW posts and communities and keeps the outward appearance of the site as an area to share news, stories, and works with people all over the world. Reddit is and will continue to be one of my most visited sites for news, OC, and yes, pictures of milk jugs with water running over the top to create a bubble.