To the uninitiated user, the pages — just lines and lines of text headlines — can be difficult to traverse. At a time when websites like Vox are looking to explain the news and make it more accessible, the news subreddits serve the most dogged of news hounds. If you’re unfamiliar with Reddit and the varying norms of its different corners, you might not be able to make much sense of the postings. For instance, a recent r/SyrianCivilWar subreddit featured a variety of posts about Islamic extremists of a Syrian organization seizing the Iraqi city of Mosul, including a YouTube video purportedly from the streets of Mosul, a tweet from an ABC News producer and several news stories. The pages are short on context. Links can be organized in various ways, such as submission time and upvotes (on Reddit, users can give “upvotes” to content they like or agree with, and “downvotes” to those they don’t). Each post has an open comments section. Otherwise, much of the information is posted with little — if any — frame of reference.

Reddit’s Newsgathering Comes of Age After Growing Pains

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