Reddit is a social news website where registered users can submit content in the form of either a link or a text post. The number of votes received from other users will then determine the submission’s position on the site’s pages and front page. Votes are intended to indicate importance and relevance rather than popularity.

Obama’s post got 6,500 comments in the first 34 minutes- Jesmond Darmanin

This concept is called social bookmarking and works the same way as other websites like digg.com, slashdot.com, newsvine.com and more.

The site is a collection of entries submitted by its registered users in what is essentially a bulletin board system.

The entries are organised into areas of interest called ‘reddits.’ Historically, the front page was the main reddit, and other areas were subreddits. Thereis now no main reddit, butthe term subreddit persists as an informal name for an areaof interest.

Registered users, especially those posting new entriesare called redditors – these can also post comments about submissions, and the comments are themselves upvoted or downvoted.

Postings are typically a link to an external source, with a title provided by the redditor who posted it. Some redditors use the site as a personal bookmark collection. Others, relying on the size and activity of Reddit and on the crowd-sourcedratings of links, use it as a news aggregator.

Front page rank, for both the general front page and forindividual reddits, is determined by the age of the submission, positive (upvoted) and negative (downvoted) feedback ratio and the total vote count. Dozens of submissions cycle through these front pages daily.

President Barack Obama showed up on Reddit late August 2012 for an unannounced Ask Me Anything session. The post set a record for Reddit, with more than 200,000 concurrent visitors. Reddit and Barack Obama quickly broke intoTwitter’s trending topics, and the story hit the blogosphere within minutes. Reddit’s servers struggled to keep up with the load, although the site never fully went down. The president’s post got 6,500 comments in the first 34 minutes.

Jesmond Darmanin is a technology enthusiast who has his own blog at www.itnewsblog.com.

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