After dabbling with Reddit over the past few days, I gained a pretty decent understanding of the site. It became easier to understand the more I used it, but there are some parts of it that I didn’t like.
One thing that I do like about Reddit is the organization that allows you to browse links in different categories or “subreddits”. This made it easier to hone in on links that interested me. I also liked the fact that the site is oriented more toward news links than other networking sites.
Though I think that Reddit is a pretty good site, I think that improvements can be made with its aesthetic design. It may sound silly, but I think that colors and fonts can make a big difference. When looking at the Reddit site I get this feeling of overload that could be easily remedied by a more appealing appearance.
I also was not a huge fan of the ranking system on Reddit. I tried to do some research about the meaning of the numbers, but it still confuses me a bit. I do understand, however, that you are supposed to click the “up” arrow if you like a link, and vice versa. I was not even sure about this though until I googled it. It may have just been me, but since it turns orange when you click up and blue when you click down, I wasn’t sure which was supposed to be positive and which was supposed to be negative. This goes back to design. I associated the blue color with “good” and the reddish color with “bad”, but it is actually the other way around.
I browsed several subreddits about news and music where I did my up-voting and down-voting.
Here are a couple of the links I posted:
This is a news story that I linked from BBC News about HIV positive individuals in China who have been denied public jobs. I posted it in the worldnews subreddit. I posted it under “Unbelievable discrimination against HIV positive individuals…”
I posted this link to a RollingStone article that talked about Jason Segel in the filming of the Muppets. I posted it under the movies subreddit.
I noticed that Reddit did not allow me to post a link that had already been posted by someone else. I’m not sure whether this is a feature that I like or dislike. I think that if there is a good story, then more submissions would make it more viewable. I understand that a story can rise in the ranks if people like it, but I feel like a good link could possibly go unnoticed if it doesn’t get a chance to circulate to people in the first place.
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