Reddit: An Attention-Based Economy

After spending many years on traditional BBCode fora, I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time over the past several years on Reddit, and it differs from those BBCode fora in several ways, and so I thought it might be interest to observe some of them, and think of how they shape the communities and discourse.

Let’s start with the basics – like most such communities, content is provided by users, but aside from starting submissions in the form of an “opening post”, there can also be link submissions, which are “Look at this neat site/article/image” as Digg used to do. The other thing that people notice about reddit is what powers it – an upvote system, essentially users get to vote “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” for anything they see, from submissions to comments, and that controls what others see.