An upvote indicates that the user likes the content or at least thinks it is worth other users seeing it. Once a post has been made on reddit, other users "upvote" or "downvote" the post (Figure 1). Recently, reddit has also begun hosting media content as well: users can post images, GIFs, and videos directly to the site instead of linking to other sites. These were initially only text posts: questions for the community, text-based stories, and so on. Over time, reddit also began to allow "self posts," that is, content that does not link to an outside source. Early in the days of reddit, all posts were links to other sites: news stories, images hosted elsewhere, and other interesting content found on the Web. In certain ways, it is very similar to message boards from the early days of the internet, but instead of text posts, the content is focused on links, images, and videos.
Describing what reddit is and how it functions can be somewhat confusing. Reddit does, however, share many features in common with social networking sites and may appear similar to these sites to some users. Adrienne Massanari (2015) noted that it "is not, strictly speaking, a social networking site" because of the lack of public and clearly defined connections between users (p.
3), but it has also been called a social aggregator or a social bookmarking site. 143), a "social link" site, or a "news-sharing" site (Massanari, 2015, p. Reddit (often stylized with a lowercase "r" on the site) may be referred to as a "social news site" (Potts & Harrison, 2013, p. Kairos 24.2: Shepherd, What Reddit - What is Reddit?