Social Learning Platform Analysis
Platform Choice & Justification
The social learning platform Reddit has been widely considered a part of the internet that people can go to for learning, finding community, and expressing themselves and their opinions. Reddit is open for browsing by anyone, as long as you have the technology and the internet; to interact with and post content, you need to make an account. Reddit Inc. (2026) states that their “mission is to empower communities and make their knowledge accessible to everyone.” For this reason, Reddit is an excellent platform for social learning, as it is inherently a social entity.
The choice to explore Reddit and how it supports social learning came from how often it comes up when I look something up on a search engine. I have usually been quite skeptical when Reddit posts come up as a search result, so I opt for another resource. My perception of Reddit before analyzing it for this assignment was pretty neutral. Although I have been increasingly hearing about Reddit from my peers and the internet, I thought I would explore the platform to get to know it better and to determine if the site would be worth using to expand my personal learning network (PLN).
How People Use Reddit
“Reddit is the most human place on the internet. It’s powered by creativity, passion, and generosity of the people.”
(Reddit, 2026)
Reddit is used by millions of people around the world, with over 130 million daily activities and 26 billion posts and comments overall (Reddit, 2026). Reddit is a place people can go to post about anything they want to connect with others, gather opinions, learn something, or share what’s on their minds. The main ways to use Reddit are by posting, commenting, and voting. Someone will make a post; others will comment with their thoughts, advice, or critiques, depending on what the original poster (OP) is asking for, and then people reading the post and comments can ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote.’ As seen in the post below, someone posted to the r/AskReddit community, “What do you miss the most about the old Internet?” At the time, the post had only been active for four hours and already had 14 upvotes and 68 comments, with the top comment saying, “Everything wasn’t monetized. People were doing stuff just for the love of it.” This comment was at the top of the post thread because it had the most upvotes (23). The up- and downvotes act as ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ buttons, almost, but they determine what gets seen, especially to casual viewers.
Since Reddit is a place that anyone can go to seek advice or to learn from experts or others that have been through similar situations, the platform is at its core a ‘social learning’ space. Anyone can look up something they are wondering about on Reddit and look through the posts and comments, and if they come up short on their search, they can post to a relevant community for advice. Even if people aren’t going to Reddit to learn something specifically, there’s lots of information throughout the site that allows for a ‘passive learning’ experience.
Analytical Framework
| Criteria | Course Concept | Indicators | Score: 24/30 |
| Social/ Personalization | Social & personalized learning | Meaningful engagement between users. Supports and boosts individual interests. | 4/5 |
| Community Engagement | Networking, Diversity/ Inclusion & PLN | Individuals can interact with one another without any barriers to make substantial connections. Enables communities to form. Does not cost users to engage fully. | 4/5 |
| Digital Trace & Safety | Digital footprint & FIPPA | Transparency around privacy and data collection. Allows users to interact on the site without fear of jeopardizing their security and safety. Does not require users to make their personal information public. | 8/10 |
| Focus/ Scope | Information disorder & Cognitive Overload | Information is monitored for accuracy and ‘fact checked’. Content is concise and easy to navigate. | 8/10 |
The Students, Ease of Use, Costs, Teaching Functions, Interaction, Organizational Issues, Networking, and Security and Privacy (SECTIONS) model was used as a guideline for this analytical framework (Bates, 2015). Since the model contains many topics, all important in their own ways, it was not used as one specific criterion but instead as a foundation.
Each criterion contains aspects of one or more of Bates’s (2015) SECTIONS principles:
- Social/Personalization: Students, Interaction & Networking
- Community Engagement: Students, Ease of Use, Costs, Interaction & Networking
- Digital Trace & Safety: Organizational Issues & Security and Privacy
- Focus/Scope: Students, Teaching Functions & Interactions
Platform Analysis
The criteria above were created to analyze and critique the ways that social learning platforms influence educational experiences. How these experiences play out is rooted in how much the platform considers and consults its users.
Social/ Personalization
4/5
Reddit (2026) claims their site is “a place where people can continue to find communities that accept and appreciate them for who they are.” They also trust these communities and give them autonomy over their interactions and presence, allowing users to use the site however they please. Through my exploration of this platform, it was difficult to determine how much personalization can be accomplished because I was browsing as a visitor, so I was most likely witnessing the default algorithm that was based off my IP address and the little time I spent looking around. From what I could see based on that alone, there were recommendations that were not too far-reaching, leading me to spend at least half an hour just looking through posts in funny communities (one I found particularly amusing was ‘r/CrappyDesign’).
As Bui and colleagues (2023) note, when students can interact with their peers online, an interactive learning environment is supported, which has now become a significant aspect of modern pedagogy. The social/personalization criteria were scored at 4/5 because Reddit appears to provide communities that cater to endless interests while providing spaces for multifaceted connection, but the research I was able to conduct was not concise enough to experience the true personalization.
Community Engagement
4/5
Within social networking, connections must be actively built, maintained, and activated to support further impact for PLNs (Rajagopal et al., 2012). Reddit communities can be viewed by anyone on the internet, providing the opportunity for people of many different backgrounds and skill sets to get involved. These diverse perspectives support a space that makes for eclectic discussions, which are then maintained through conversation and moderators.
As seen in the image below, there is a vast number of communities that people can join. With more than 100,000 active communities on Reddit (Reddit, 2026), there is sure to be at least a couple specific communities that align with anyone’s interests and goals. Unlike some community spaces, like Patreon or Instagram subscriptions, joining these spaces does not come at a cost to the user. It is free to join or create a Reddit community, making it more accessible and desirable for those looking for a space to connect with others.
Since these spaces attract people with similar interests, the comment sections seem to be pretty tight-knit, full of expressions unique to their world and esoteric memes. In the picture below is a post from the r/GTA community about someone sharing their ‘god-like flying skills,’ followed by a meme with the most upvotes. As someone who has not played GTA, none of this makes sense to me, but the 50 comments are all people who know what is going on and are impressed by the video.
Digital Trace & Safety
8/10
Everything posted on Reddit is ‘public content,’ which is undesirable for formal education, especially since Reddit can be viewed by anyone with a laptop and internet access (Reddit Help, 2026). Although private communities can be made, providing adequate privacy for a social learning space directed by an institution and teacher. Reddit also has a comprehensive privacy policy where they are explicit about what is public information and what is private, even going as far as to state that if you were not comfortable with having your activity on their site public or don’t want to stick to private communities, then you should delete your account entirely (Reddit Privacy Policy, 2026).
During my exploration on Reddit, I was not logged into an account to see what it is like to be a visitor on this site and not leave much of a trace behind me (White & Le Cornu, 2017). I was able to open and look at every post I came across but was unable to comment or vote on anything; if I tried to interact with a post, a signup prompt came up asking to input a phone number or email. The ability to use Reddit without needing a login makes the site feel like an open access learning resource, where it can be visited with specific intentions without your footprint being impacted.
There are many things that Reddit does right as a public platform, but the lack of privacy settings users have access to is what brought the score down in this section. Although Reddit is very transparent about their intentions of being a public space that is welcoming to all, it is not welcoming to people who don’t want to be contributing to such a public sphere.
Focus/ Scope
8/10
Anyone can post anything they want on Reddit; with its thousands of daily posts and interactions, the platform must be incredibly hard to monitor and moderate. This leaves room for mis- or mal-information to infiltrate. Reddit has each of the elements of information disorder that Wardle and Derakhshan (2017) outline: the agent, the message, and the interpreter. On Reddit, each user has the ability to fill any of these roles, and most of them do if they are active in any community. Along with this, if the platform were to be used in an institutional setting, it would be incredibly difficult to regulate what students would see while using the site. There is no way to use the site and only see and interact with one community, even if it is private, mostly due to the explore pages that are designed to catch your eye on almost every page throughout the site.
The site is easy to navigate if you are scrolling or searching up something in particular, although there are many distractions throughout (which is kind of the point). In the screenshot below is what came up from opening Reddit.com from a search engine. I was immediately shown Reddit posts, a feedback survey, and two sidebars, one wanting me to log in and the other wanting me to explore active communities. The platform having been built in a tiered fashion makes it simple for anyone to follow along, starting with the community, then the individual posts in the community, with then having their own comment sections. Having these roughly ‘categorized’ systems allows the information to be organized in an easy-to-find manner and may make moderation easier than a ‘catch-all’ platform.
Reflection & Implications
Overall, Reddit has great potential as a social learning platform. It lets learners explore vast topics and opinions and has the potential to be used in an institutional setting, where a teacher establishes a private community page for them to connect. While searching through the site, it was obvious that Reddit fosters thousands of active communities, most of the posts shown were from the last day and already had upwards of hundreds of comments. Although, users may get distracted or overwhelmed with the amount of information present at any time while on the platform. Internet and access to a computer or a mobile device are both needed to interact with this site, excluding those who are unable to have secure access to those (limited or no WiFi, library or school computer, etc.; Bates, 2015). Where Reddit excels as a social learning platform is in the non-institutional domain, where users are going to the platform to learn something from others who have been through similar things or are an expert in the related field. This is accompanied by the Reddit posts that end up on search engine results, all because it is an open access site.
Comparing Reddit to my analytical framework, it was given a score of 24/30. The site is very clear about its intentions of being “the most human place on the internet” (Reddit, 2026). With this comes countless types of interactions, which made it difficult to focus solely on the social learning environment, leading me to believe that this is a limitation that the platform has to support learners.
References
Bates, A. (2015, April 5). Chapter 8: Choosing and using media in education: the SECTIONS model. Teaching in a Digital Age. https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/
Bui, H. P., Ulla, M. B., Tarrayo, V. N., & Pham, C. T. (2023). Editorial: The roles of social media in education: Affective, behavioral, and cognitive dimensions. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, Article 1287728. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1287728
Rajagopal, K., Joosten-ten Brinke, D., Van Bruggen, J., & Sloep, P. B. (2012). Understanding personal learning networks: Their structure, content and the networking skills needed to optimally use them. First Monday, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v17i1.3559
Reddit Inc. (2026, October 13). Reddit Inc. https://redditinc.com/
Reddit Privacy Policy. (2026). Reddit Inc. https://www.reddit.com/policies/privacy-policy?__hstc=53109431.975cbb037f42c59324a4f202b95f00d4.1792963347610.1792963347610.1792963347610.1&__hssc=53109431.2.1792963347610&__hsfp=e7a59de4e5053e5ed94dd92842aec0ed
Reddit Help. (2026). Public Content Policy. https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/26410290525844-Public-Content-Policy
Tong, A., Wang, E., & Coulter, M. (2024, February 22). Exclusive: Reddit in AI content licensing deal with Google. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/technology/reddit-ai-content-licensing-deal-with-google-sources-say-2024-02-22/
Wardle, C., & Derakhshan, H. (2017). Information disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making (Council of Europe Report DGI(2017)09). Council of Europe. https://edoc.coe.int/en/media/7495-information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for-research-and-policy-making.html
White, D. S., & Le Cornu, A. (2017). Using ‘Visitors and Residents’ to visualise digital practices. First Monday, 22(8). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i8.7802