Reddit is an interesting social media sites compared to the more linear approaches of Instagram and Snapchat. However, when compared to Facebook and Twitter who tailor your feed to show you the “top” content, Reddit’s approach makes a lot more sense. The way that Reddit allows users to up/down vote content is reflected in the content scores and any comment on a topic is similarly voted up or down depending on the whim of other users. Reddit’s clear display of this scoring system makes it more transparent than other social media algorithms.
Reddit allows users to expand their reading interests and find articles of interest by allowing you to subscribe to ‘sub-Reddits’ that relate to the user’s topics of interest. Within those sub-Reddits users normally post links to articles or other content with a reason for the post. This can allow a user to quickly explore lots of content. Depending on the number of contributors of content then there is a great opportunity for you to discover new articles. The downside that there is often a lack of moderation within sub-reddits and it takes a little time to understand how the platform works and what is/is not worth looking at.
Compared to Feedly, a site that I use to keep up with my personal learning network (see my write up here) which is often a self-curated list of articles to read from certain key trusted sources, Reddit puts the user out of their comfort zone potentially exposing the user to a lot of junk content but similarly taking the user out of their filter bubble and engaging with a more raw version of the web that could prompt a user to come up with new ideas. However, this rawness means that it should only be one source of articles and reading as there is only so much free time in the day to wade through mixed content and sometimes you just need to find and read information from trusted sources.