India is moving towards Reddit, and it is not a good sign for Facebook or Twitter

The online discussion fever is growing among the Indian millennials. The social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website, which provided a space for young minds to not just vent their frustrations, also allowed them to participate in hot online debates around each and everything under the hood from politics to sports to food and entertainment. This phenomenon is now taking young Indians by the storm who are joining Reddit in a big way. 

Reddit which hails itself as “the front page of the Internet” was ranked as the fifth most visited website in the US, it ranks 13th in the world, as per Alexa Internet. 

Christine Lagorio-Chafkin in his book “We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet’s Culture Laboratory” says that “Reddit along with its users have become a mirror of the Internet: it has dingy corners, shiny memes, malicious trolls, along with sometimes a heart-melting ability to connect people across cultures, oceans, and ideological divides.”

How many people are using Reddit in India?

In April, nearly 1.6 billion visits were measured to the online forum, making it one of the most-visited websites online, as per statista.com. Reddit has over 130,000 sub-forums as well as communities, it allows registered users, called Redditors, to post content.

The post is open to the entire Reddit community to vote upon, the users have the ability to either downvote or upvote. The most popular posts are featured on the front page.

Subreddits are available by category, Redditors can follow selected “subreddits” catering to their interest, users can also control what content they see on their custom front page.

Though Reddit does not regularly disclose its user numbers like Facebook or Twitter, the online discussion forum had over 330 million users globally in 2018.

People recently joining Reddit are finding found it very useful. Users are quite fascinated by the feature where their followers can post ‘upvotes’ as well as ‘downvotes’ for each post and comment. The concept of earning ‘karma’ for the posts and comments which reflects the user’s standing within the community and their contributions to Reddit also attracts new users.

Earlier this year, Reddit’s valuation rose to $3 billion, from $1.8 billion in 2017, as per the media reports. If you are looking to join Reddit, and then you can look at the most popular Subreddits on the site, these are the “blue-chip communities” AskReddit and “IAmA” (ask me anything).

The “Wholesome Memes” on the platform are not only heart-warming, but they are also helping to shape a better, more positive online space, according to Indian users. At the moment, Reddit is not as bullish on India as other social media platforms are, however, that day does not seem to be far.

The graphics of Facebook and Reddit are poles apart. Their approaches to connecting users to information are different.

Facebook provides a space where individual opinions are prioritized within the timeline of that particular User, while other users can Like, Comment, or react to their post. However, the information aspect of Facebook can only be accessed via pages, groups, and the features facilitated by Facebook.

While Reddit provides direct access to the information aspect by infusing the personal as well as the social space with information only. It is a space designed for one purpose, that is either information or news. Reddit offers its users to communicate with each other, however, it is not personalized as every communication is either directly or indirectly related to information.

The main difference between Reddit and Twitter is that on Reddit, you have more privacy as only the user’s username is displayed. Whereas on Twitter, along with the username, you must give a bio about yourselves. Twitter is a social media website along with microblogging, while Reddit is a social news aggregation website. A user does not reveal themselves on Reddit

The reason why the surging popularity of Reddit amongst Indian millennials, is because of the huge user base India provides. This popularity would mean Reddit would be taking shares of the pie from Facebook and Twitter. Though these companies are engraved in the Indian market, Reddit provides something that the other two don’t that is a new environment, a chance to indulge in a fresh community, and that is what is attracting new Indian users. 

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