I’ve seen references to it, so I’ve given it a few looks. Visually, the self-proclaimed “front page of the internet” is chaotic to the eye of the newbie (not to be confused with “the eye of newt”). I’ve looked at some sites that are supposed to help someone navigate Reddit, but I don’t like them. I want Dopers to tell me how to navigate Reddit. I trust Dopers. Also what’s good about Reddit (if anything). How heavily is it moderated? I like the level of modding here–is it more or less? Where should I begin? Help an old lady out?
Yes, there are actual voluntary mods in the different subreddits that make sure people follows the basic guidelines. There’s also a “karma” number of imaginary internet points, comments and posts can be give or taken (“upvoting” and “downvoting”), so it’s also self-moderated.
This creates a weird behavior etiquete. If you say anything slightly controversial, you run the risk of being downvoted and have your comment disappear to the bottom of the thread. Lurking for a while is a good idea, to get the lay of the land. Some subreddits may find a comment funny and upvote it, others may find the same thing clichéd and tiresome and downvote it.
Reddit used to be fairly lenient in allowing all sort of subreddits, including the xenophobic and sexist ones, until they started banning some of them, which was a big deal back then.
You can “subscribe” to the subreddits that interest you (and there’s practically one for everything) and then your homepage will consist of the newest top comments in your subreddits. That makes for a fairly easy navigation according to your interests.
no. I abhor the threaded layout.
Thanks. 
Your last comment is particularly helpful.
I read the Yogscast and Highrollers D&D subreddits sometimes, but I do not like the threaded layout either. I prefer chronological sorting.
That was my thought when Digg changed those many years ago. You get used to it.
I subscribe to several areas, and I find that often breaking news is on Reddit before it is anywhere else. Great place to lurk, and there are some really good sub reddits for specific topics as well (I follow r/fencing for example, and the various D&D forums, plus some on startups and entrepreneurship. )
I don’t really like the format, although I browse it for gaming info.
/r/askhistorians is legit, though, and quite a rabbit hole.
You can sort posts chronologically.
The layout is a bit off-putting but you get used to it. There is a subreddit for virtually everything. I really like my local one for discussions on neighborhood stuff. An easy way to get started is doing a subreddit search on your town or county and taking it from there.
ETA: If you get hooked, it’s worth getting the free Reddit Enhancement Suite extensions for Chrome.
Chronological sorting only really works for relatively small threads, like the ones we have here, which are policed for off-topic posts, like we do here. Reddit is both too big and not moderated enough for that to work, which would lead to Reddit threads becoming utterly unreadable once they got to any kind of real size.
The only threads we get here which even begin to approach the sizes of moderately-large Reddit threads are our game threads, where you typically don’t have to read every single post to participate, only the most recent one. Those do rely on chronological sorting, but they’re not exactly hotbeds of deep human interaction.
(And, if it isn’t obvious, I do hang out and post on Reddit.)
I’ve been browsing around Reddit and subscribing/unsubscribing to stuff. It is indeed a VAST community of communities. Mind-boggling, really.
Question: when I click on “home,” all the topics/subject lines that appear there are from the subreddits I’m subscribed to, right? And if I only want to see *one *of those subreddits and its posts, I use the drop-down menu on the left side of the screen to zero in on just that one?
EEK. If you’re new and don’t have “karma” in a given subreddit, you have to wait 10 MINUTES between posts. Even in different subreddits on different topics. Makes the 2-minute limit here seem pretty benign.
I poke around there every so often. I don’t like the nested threads either, but as others have said, you get used to it the more you poke around.
I find the more esoteric the subreddit the more thoughtful the discussion. The “ask a historian” subreddit is a great example.
I love reddit. I spend a lot of my internet time there.
I read some of the interesting posts just to keep up with what the kids are talking about, but…
The up vote/down vote/karma, awarding Reddit Gold to posts you agree with thing, really ruins the place for any kind of discussion. If you think that the SDMB is an insular echo chamber of correct thought, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Any contrary point of view to the issue being discussed, even a mild one, on any of the many topic threads, will quickly drop right out of sight, right off the page. It will affect your “karma”, your ability to have your posts even seen at all. And with so many different r/topics you also have hundreds of moderators you need to keep on the good side of or be banned.
But if you are looking for affirmation of a particular point of view then Reddit will be Eden for you. “Oh shit!” I just got banned from r/atheist for saying Eden. If you see what I mean.
While the SDMB leans mostly liberal, at least opposing views are allowed and if supported with some reason, they are listened and responded to. You don’t have to worry on Reddit, if you don’t speak to the Hive Mind on the topic then what you have to say will never even be seen.
And the format sucks.
Same. There are just subreddits for every little thing it seems. And you get news really quick over there. Yes, the upvote/downvote thing is slightly offputting, but it gets pretty easy to figure out and different subreddits have different usages of downvotes (some actually do only downvote if it’s a comment that adds nothing to the convo while some do it if they don’t like what you say - I stay away from the latter as much as possible).
Huh, that doesn’t match my experiences either here or on Reddit, where I spend a huge chunk of my internet time these days. I actually find Reddit far less hive minded than this board is. It does depend a lot on which subreddits you hang around in. I will also agree with the observation that the more esoteric the subject, the better the discussions tend to be.
I basically stopped posting on the SDMB around 2011 and now spend most of my internet time on Reddit (although I have had a Reddit account since 2008.) I’m posting here right now because Reddit was down today. I miss not being able to up/downvote y’all.
A question from another reddit noob: is there any categorized directory/catalog of subreddits? Right now the only way I found to explore subreddits is by the search function, but that’s tiresome. There must be some other way which I’m to dumb to find.
Nobody likes to hear this, but I’ll say it anyway:
Generalizing about Reddit is like generalizing about New York City. Or Chicago. It’s just that big, and that segmented, in that subreddits form cliques and, well, a subreddit devoted to praising Donald Trump is going to have a lot more natural overlap with one devoted to believing in conspiracy theories than it is with a subreddit about trans issues. Generally, when substantial numbers of users of a subreddit go visit another subreddit outside their subreddit’s usual clique, it’s an act of war, called a downvote brigade, or a straight-up trolling run, although those are rarer due to low-level subreddit moderators being able to hand out unlimited numbers of bans.
(Reminds me of Usenet, it does… so, by all means, say it’s a Kids These Days kind of thing and harrumph about how trolling is completely novel and unheard-of.)
Point being, Reddit is one of the big sites on the Internet. Saying it is any one thing politically or culturally is both popular and, frankly, rather stupid.