Ok, I know you've been curious and kind of meaning to learn more about that reddit thing "one of these days". Today is the day, man ... Carpe Diem! Just dip your toes in, the water is fine ... You can do this!

Why would you want to? Because over on reddit there are two ab-fab sites called KFS (Kossacks for Sanders) and WotB (Way of the Bern), and a ton more sites too but these two are the most important ones on all of reddit, lol. Why? Because some of your fellow refugees landed over there when the great exodus from GOS happened in March, and you miss them and you want to know what they are up to these days, amiright or amiright?

These sites on reddit have the same effect as the Huffington Post, they are aggregator sites that allow a collection of useful links (to items published anywhere on the Internet, including c99p) to be created and stored in one convenient place. These communities are OCD re Sanders-type, progressive news (just like you!) and sometimes (often?) they find stories that the folks on c99p haven't yet discovered. So, if you ever want to have a tiny bit of variety in your day, you might want to come on over and just check them out to see what's going on over there ...

FYI, the emphasis on this essay is on READING reddit, so you can become a full-fledged lurker whenever you want. Half the fun, of course, is making comments though (right?) ... I will be writing a second essay in the near future in order to allow you to learn how to add comments and even your own "content' over there too. Why would you want to add content? Because you want a BIGGER AUDIENCE for the brilliant essays that you have been publishing here on c99p, that's why.

As it is, you do a bunch of work to write a fabulous essay that a greater number of people really should read and actually want to read but DON"T READ BECAUSE THEY DON'T KNOW ABOUT IT!!!! Simply because THEY are there and YOU are here. You can FIX that problem by doing something very simple: adding a very short cross-post announcement on reddit to let THOSE FOLKS know about your essay. And it doesn't take that much time. Compared to the time to create the essay, the time to cross-post on reddit is like pennies on the dollar. And for those pennies, your words have the potential to go that much further. And every time you cross-post, you are also sending traffic over here to c99p, which is kind of like watering a plant, IMHO. It's a good thing for everybody, it's a WIN/WIN, it is the dreaded-word SYNERGY!

Are you ready? Ok, let's do it!

1. Register for Reddit. You can do this many different places, but I'm going to have you do it from the home page.

   Go to https://www.reddit.com/. In the upper right, you will see "Want to join? Log in or sign up in seconds." Click the "sign up" link, and do the necessary. Many refugees have chosen a user id on reddit that is similar to the one that they used on GOS, you might want to do the same.

   Truth be known, if you really don't want to take this step today, you don't have to - you can still complete the rest of this primer. But I encourage you to do it, because it is practically the hardest part and you might as well just do it and get it over with. You will need to complete this step before you are able to make comments or add content though.

2. You are now a reddit user. Congratulations! Think of Reddit as kind of a large shopping mall. At the mall, there are zillions of stores, right? On reddit, there are zillions of communities, they are usually called subreddits, or subs. The good stuff that you want is in the stores/on the subreddits. Each subreddit has its own particular flavor.
3. How do you navigate to a particular subreddit? Here are a few things you can do right now:
   • Visit and bookmark KFS at https://www.reddit.com/r/Kossacks_for_Sanders/
   • Visit and bookmark WotB at https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/
   • In the top menu bar at the very top of the page there is a list of subs, like "FRONT", "FUNNY", "PICS", etc. Each is a link that takes you to a particular subreddit. For example, click on FUNNY. You will see a list of links to items that have been submitted by those who have joined the "funny" community. Use your Internet savvy to read any of these items: for any item, click on either the little icon to the left, or the first link for the item (which has the biggest text) and you will go off to read it. Hint: if you "CTRL click" on the link, it will open in a separate browser window (which I find convenient so that I am less disoriented).
   • When you are a registered member of reddit, there are also other useful ways to get around; I will talk about those in my next essay.
4. The official reddit name of the "funny" subreddit is /r/funny, probably because that is the suffix of the URL for that site's home page. Take a moment now to look at the URL. Can you see the /r/funny at the end of it? FYI, in the future if you ever make a comment and refer to a subreddit by its official name, the name will be automatically turned into a hyperlink that points to the subreddit itself. In other words, the text "/r/funny" will point to https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/ automatically, so the result will look like this: /r/funny
5. The official word for an item on a list (i.e. the equivalent of a "diary" on GOS) is post. In other words, when you visit a particular subreddit, you obtain a list of posts. FYI, I only learned this bit of trivia after about 6 months of using reddit. You? You get it today, right now! You're welcome.
6. In the top menu bar of every (?) subreddit, there are a bunch of tabs: hot, new, rising, controversial, top, gilded, wiki, promoted. They are there for KFS and WotB at least, these might be configurable by the site moderators of other sites, I'm not 100% sure.
   • By default, you go to the "hot" tab, which shows you the most highly rated posts currently on the subreddit. "hot" is kind of like the rec list on GOS. "hot" is also similar to "top", which also shows you highly rated posts; however "top" allows you to specify a certain time frame: past week, past hour, past month, etc. "hot" is like the most breaking, top stories, I'm not exactly sure what the actual time frame is (maybe it's past day?).
   • To the left of any post, you will find an up arrow, a down arrow, and a number. Once you are registered, if you like a post, you can upvote it. You also have the option to downvote it. The number essentially shows you the net number of votes (i.e. upvotes minus downvotes). Note: these numbers are not 100% what they seem, reddit uses algorithms to set these numbers to somehow weed out spam-bots, I'm not 100% sure how it works. But the higher the number, the greater the number of folks who seem to like it.

     FYI, the site moderators can configure the site in such a way to take away one or more of these attributes, especially the downvote button. On that note, the look and the feel of the site is also configurable so you will notice that each sub tends to have it's own very distinctive look.

   • tab new - shows you the most recently added posts. "new" is kind of like Recent Diaries over on GOS. I personally tend to start with the "hot" tab, and when I am done there I mostly hang out at "new".
   • tab rising - shows you new posts that seem to be getting a lot of interest, that is a lot of upvotes (and/or just clicks, I think).
   • tab controversial - these are posts that are getting both upvotes and downvotes. KFS and WotB tend to get visited by trolls, who tend to downvote as a way to disrupt the community. If you go to controversial, basically you can find posts that the trolls seem to hate ... I like to get back at the trolls by upvoting some of these posts to give them more visibility.
   • tab gilded - reddit has this thing called giving gold, it is basically a way of raising money to support reddit itself. You can give gold to honor either a post or a user. The "gilded" tab allows you to see the posts that somebody found so wonderful that they gave money to reddit as a kind of way to "honor and give thanks" for it. These are very special posts indeed.
   • tab wiki - this is a tremendously useful tab to know about, wiki is a help page for the subreddit itself; it gives you a page of special information that helps you better understand and become a member of that particular sub's community, for example its mission, rules, and guidelines.
7. In the right navigation bar, there is a link called "New to Reddit? Click here!". It will take you to a wiki page called reddit_101. There is a lot of great help information, especially on something called reddiquette, which tells you about the "manners" you are supposed to show at all times when you are on any part of reddit itself.

Okay, I think that covers the basics. There are a lot of little tidbits to know about how reddit works, undoubtedly I left off something here that I simply haven't learned yet myself. But I think that should cover most of what you need to know to be able to visit and read /r/Kossacks_for_Sanders/ and /r/WayOfTheBern/.

So why are you even still here? What are you waiting for? Go dog, go!

P.S. In honor of my special friend ec, who has actually admitted that she is "trying to infiltrate [c99p] with cats," I want to tell everyone about a new sub that I found while writing this essay: /r/CatsMurderingToddlers. The sub /r/PootiesMurderingToddlers remains unclaimed, however.