Excerpt from a post by SolariaHues in r/NewToReddit
Here's my orientation guide -
Reddit is a collection of communities (subreddits) you can join and participate in, which each have their own rules and culture. It can help to learn about those things for each community before jumping in, by checking for rules and lurking for a bit to see what the community is like.
Each community is similar to a message board in a way. People make posts which start a thread and others comment below and start sub threads. Good content is valued and earns you upvotes, which earn you karma. Some communities have restrictions and you'll need to have some karma in order to participate.
From Wikipedia:
Reddit is a website comprising user-generated content—including photos, videos, links, and text-based posts—and discussions of this content in what is essentially a bulletin board system.[85][86] The name "Reddit" is a play-on-words with the phrase "read it", i.e., "I read it on Reddit."[87][88]
Registered users who subscribe to subreddits see the top content from the subreddits to which they subscribe on their personal front pages.[90][92] Additionally, some subreddits have a karma and account age requirement to discourage bots and spammers from posting.
Front-page rank—for both the general front page and for individual subreddits—is determined by a combination of factors, including the age of the submission, positive ("upvoted") to negative ("downvoted") feedback ratio, and the total vote-count.[97]
In Reddit style, usernames begin with "u/" [and subreddits begin with "r/"].
From https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddit_101/
By making an account, you are automatically subscribed to a set of "default" subreddits which are a set of highly popular communities that the administrators of this site feel would give the average person an interesting first experience.
Don't like one or more of these default subreddits? Use the "unsubscribe" button on the sidebar, and start customizing your reddit front page! Find subreddits that interest you. Many subreddits feature lists of "similar subreddits" that will help you find other awesome places to subscribe to. Looking for a subreddit but you just don't know its name? Try /r/findareddit! Finally, try setting up a multi-reddit to categorize your subreddit list even further!
Verify your e-mail. If you don't do this and you lose your password, you will have no way to log back onto that account. Ever. Please do this!
