The social media outlet Reddit.com has become increasingly popular in the past few months. Reddit has been used in many ways; as a forum for users to discuss common interests, politics, etc., as a means for users protest acts such as SOPA and PIPA, or even merely a place for people to share cute pictures of cats.
Reddit is split up into what are known as "subreddits." If a user wants to post funny content, he would post to www.reddit.com/r/funny. If a user wants to post content related to video gaming, he would post it to http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming. If a user has content he would like to post, yet lacks an appropiate subreddit to post to, he can create one himself. This is what makes Reddit such a power-player in this age of social media.
According to Wagner James Au of Internet Evolution, "Reddit's rise is directly related to the dominance of social networks that fail to let us share online content and community in ways we need, which Reddit can better provide."
With its ever-growing user-base and its accepting and inviting community paired with users having the ability to create their own subcommunities within the site, Reddit is quickly becoming the most useful and most entertaining web community out there. It reaches its users in a way Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter simply cannot.
Recently, Reddit has gained a massive amount of positive exposure after its users donated a total of over $80,000 to an orphanage in Kenya. According to the linked article, Anthony Omari was attacked at the orphanage "By taking a machete to the face while defending an under-resourced Kenyan orphanage from attacking thieves."