Reddit: The Front Page of the Internet

The internet provides a wealth of resources at your fingertips. With algorithmically assigned timelines, websites attempt to tailor what you see to what you want to see. Within these filter bubbles, the phrase "seeing is believing" is obsolete; Google, Facebook, and now even Instagram believe the opposite: You have to believe it to see it.

One thriving community of knowledge I actively lurk is Reddit. Reddit advertises itself as "The front page of the Internet" because of the breadth and depth of topics discussed in the form of a community style bulletin board. On the homepage, you will see the top stories of the day according to "upvotes" and user engagement (views, comments, comment upvotes). At the top of the homepage, are subreddits. Each board, or "subreddit" is denoted by the prefix "r/". Reddittors can subscribe to any type of subreddit. There's a subreddit for everything, from games, TV shows, cute pictures of animals, and even r/mildlyinteresting (for those who opting to be only a safe amount of entertained). Once logged in, you may add or delete which subreddits appear at the top and subscribe to certain posts. If you are truly curious as to the breadth of subreddits, you can choose one at random. Each subreddit has their own community with varying rules, headers, and icons. These communities are moderated because anyone within the communities can post. Within each post, comments are organized by helpfulness (according to other users in the form of these upvotes). That being said, the credibility of these threads are very low because of the subjectivity involved in aggregating these responses. However, with some subreddits like r/IAmA (which stands for "I am a..."), verified people of interest respond to the reddit community through an online, live Q&A. People hosting AMAs can be anyone famous, or anyone requested out of curiosity (There's a request right now for Donald Trump's Hair Stylist). With a variety of users ranging from expert to "some 12 year old", Reddit provides digestable insights from linked posts, original posts, and comments.

Watch the video below for the Don'ts of Reddiquette, parodied by Jake and Amir (who are doing an r/IAmA on March 29 at 2PM)

The problem with social networking communities is that they're limited to often subjective and polarized opinions. For more expert and more scholarly opinions, communities of knowledge such as Feedly and Podcasts allow you to aggregate information on a variety of topics that might interest you from specific blogs like Seth Godin.

Other Communities of Knowledge

Feedly

Feedly uses RSS feeds to aggregate them on tabs on your sidebar. In my opinion, Feedly is more like an online newspaper tailored to things that interest me, ranging from fashion to business. It has a cleaner interface than Reddit and is more passive when digesting knowledge.

Podcasts

If you prefer to keep up to date with the daily news or cool stories, you can subscribe to Podcasts. On the iTunes app, you can browse through a variety of subjects, whether educational or leisure.

Podcasts I'm currently subscribed to range from Serial to Startup, Stuff You Should Know to "stuff nobody should know" in the style of a humor podcast called Desus vs. Mero. These Podcasts are automatically synced to my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook and updated when a new podcast is broadcasted. I like to listen to these podcasts on my commute to school, or one lazy afternoon at the beach, Sarah Koenig transported me to a murder mystery in the form of an addictive series called Serial.

With the customizability, real-time publishing, and reduction of barriers to content creation in our news feeds, the print industry has had to react appropriately. Magazine companies must publish digital, newspaper companies must make apps, and this might even mean they have to shut down some of their factories, just as The Toronto Star had.