Because Reddit connects strangers, it has certain advantages over Facebook, which connects friends. Ideas may spread more widely from Reddit than from Facebook despite a smaller pool of users. An idea shared between Facebook friends may peter out quickly as social networks reach saturation: an idea spread through friends who went to the same college may lose momentum when all alumni have heard about it.

Reddit users are connected to many different communities, and an idea spread on Reddit’s front page may go on to spread in thousands of different groups of friends on Facebook. This power to disseminate ideas to many different social subnets may explain why Reddit memes often go viral and why Reddit has emerged as a key node in online activism.

In social network theory terms, Reddit has figured out how to tap into “the strength of weak ties”¹, whereas information on Facebook tends to keep getting recycled among people who already share strong ties offline.

Luke Kingma also touches on this strength in his interesting post The Next Great Social Network Will Not Put Relationships First:

The vast majority of us are not fortunate enough to have an incredibly diverse and interesting network of friends, family, and colleagues. Reddit works because the measure of a user is the content he shares, not the company he keeps. Moreover, visibility on Reddit is directly proportional to one’s utility in a given conversation. As a result, we are exposed to more interesting people, ideas, and perspectives.

This access to experts on any topic imaginable is what makes Reddit so powerful. The principle of content > relationships is probably also why Medium doesn’t have a follower model for its authors, but instead organizes content in topic collections. But Medium is a different topic altogether — I’ll post some thoughts on that platform soon.