Reddit – the Driving Force Behind Internet Trends
The driving force behind trending content on the Internet is an online social media community called Reddit. Reddit.com, founded in 2005, now has over 55 million unique visitors per month. As a user (either account holder or not), you can browse thousands of categorized pages with unique content, weigh in on comment threads, or post your own content to be shared with millions of other people. The aggregate force of millions of users drives popularity of shared Internet content, creating Internet trends.
Reddit employs all of three principals behind the emergence of the Web 2.0. The website itself is meant to be a vehicle for sharing information, the website is fully integrated into the cloud (i.e. no user data is stored locally on the user’s computer), and the structural layout of the website promotes inter-page connections and user interaction.
A reputation system allows users to provide signals, in the form of up votes or down votes, to promote or flag the behavior or misbehavior of others. Interesting and unique content will be up voted more and will then be moved higher up in a webpage into a more trending position where it is more easily viewed. Garbage content will be down voted and disappear from the website. If a user is causing inappropriate conflict or posting inappropriate information, fellow users can flag this user to Reddit’s moderators (verified users or Reddit employees), who will punish the user by either eliminating his post or banning him from the site. This trust system provides a structural balance that allows users to be comfortable commenting or sharing content.
The “wisdom of the crowd” weeds out content that is not popular and promotes that which is. Content that becomes popular on Reddit soon explodes all over the Internet on pages such as CNN.com, Yahoo.com, and many other large websites. Although the inception of embedded video content and other Internet techniques replaces direct links between a news article and the original Reddit link, the content always grows directly from a particular “subreddit”.
https://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/what-reddit-and-why-should-you-care