Sure, Reddit was already the unofficial “front page of the Internet,” the soul of all things meme, the secret sauce behind BuzzFeed’s viral posts, a breaking news curator and a Q&A forum for journalists, celebrities, newsmakers.
But then President Obama did a surprise Q&A appearance Wednesday that nearly crashed servers and drew almost 23,000 comments and questions. Obama didn’t bestow legitimacy upon Reddit — with nearly 40 million visitors and 3.2 billion pageviews a month, it already had that. But the visit from a sitting president certainly says something about its increasingly mainstream relevance.
The structure: Reddit consists of a bunch of “subreddits,” or topic sections. The most popular stuff bubbles up to the front page, but each post starts and lives on a specific subreddit. Every post, and every comment on every post, can be upvoted or downvoted by each user. Votes are how the community determines the best content, which rises to the top.
Definitions: Like many online communities, Reddit has developed its own shorthand. AMA, the type of post Obama did, stands for “Ask Me Anything.” It’s an open Q&A thread where one notable person answers questions from everyone else. TIL is short for “Today I Learned…” TIL usually precedes a specific surprising fact. Both AMAs and TILs could be occasional sources of story ideas for journalists.
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