I am a person who doesn’t use a lot of social media, the ones I currently have are out of necessity. But what I do use a lot of is Reddit, which is similar in concept to some social media, but differs in important ways that makes it special to me.

Most Social Medias have influencers, celebrities with millions of followers, huge brands that push their products in your face. Mostly, up-and-coming content creators are overshadowed by these huge influencers. Giving them no chance to grow, even if their content is good. What you’re left with is these celebrities and brands, posting the same sponsored content everyday, appealing to the lowest common denominator, always featured in the front page.

Most people don’t mind this, and don’t have the time or motivation to search for good content creators, and just consume the content that is recommended to them by these influencers. But it is detrimental to these sites because what’s keeping it alive is new content, not recycled clickbait that these brands put out.

In most social media, it seems like the goal is to get more followers, get more likes, to show how much better your life is compared to others. This mindset is rarely found on Reddit. While there is “likes” in the form of upvotes, it translates into your account’s Karma, which is nice to have a lot of, but in the end is nothing but useless internet points. And to get more karma you have to keep posting good content.

Reddit is an ecosystem where everyone is equal, it’s a democracy. It all revolves around the content. If you post good content, you will get upvoted, if you are lazy and blatantly repost, you will get downvoted. So the community itself is like an immunity system, keeping the good posts alive while removing the bad ones. This is especially useful for people who are looking to share their creations and thoughts that is just not possible in other sites.

Reddit is a forum where you can discuss anything, which means that there is a subreddit about everything. You can discuss things with people about similar interests that you just couldn’t do offline.

Recently, Reddit went through a redesign, and sadly now it has more of a social media layout than the familiar forum one. And now advertisements are slipped in in between content, disguised as normal posts. I fear that this choice of redesigning Reddit to attract new users from Facebook and Instagram is a misguided one and will drive regular Redditors away, which is a shame, because this is one of the few sites that I really enjoy spending time on.