For those who don’t know, Reddit is a social media site designed to allow people to share interesting Internet content sorted by topic. These topics are created by making a “subreddit”, which is basically just a section of the site devoted to a specific topic. These subreddits can be created by any member of the site, and function both as a place to submit content from the Internet as well as forums used to discuss the topic. Some of these spaces were created specifically to pursue education, politics, health, and other aspects of life that being more informed about will allow you to improve yourself in some way. Though there is also plenty of the typical online riffraff (which can be plenty fun, mind you) across Reddit as a whole, I’m here to focus on the best of Reddit’s self improvement offerings.
A final note, before we get started. Common parlance on Reddit refers to a subreddit with the format /r/”topic”, as a shorthand for the way it is displayed in the full url, www.reddit.com/r/”topic”. You’ll sometimes see me refer to them this way as I discuss them.
First, we’ll start with /r/fitness and /r/bodyweightfitness. Fitness, as you might guess, is generally about getting and staying fit. The focus is on exercise and diet, and these topics are fairly well covered across the spectrum by the conversations that take place. There is a definite preference for lifting over cardiovascular exercise, but there’s a lot to learn here too. Similarly, bodyweightfitness is more specialized to discuss exercises that don’t require weights, and instead utilize your own body weight, like push-ups, pull-ups, and body weight squats to start with some basics.
Moving into the mental realm, we have /r/askscience and /r/explainlikeimfive. Askscience is a place to ask questions about science ranging from psychology to physics and engineering and get solid scientific answers. The community is heavily moderated, and posts that provide bad information or that can’t be supported with evidence are actively removed by the moderators to make sure information presented is accurate. Explainlikeimfive, often abbreviated to ELI5, was created as a place to ask questions and receive answers broken down and explained in a simple, easy to understand fashion. ELI5 also encourages accuracy, though their moderation is generally less strict than askscience, as one might expect.
For more active learning, there is also /r/universityofreddit. The goal here is to provide online courses to help direct people in the study of a topic over the Internet. There is no accreditation or degree of any kind, so don’t head over in hopes of it being a substitute for college in that regard. However, if you’re looking to learn calculus, programming, music theory, philosophy, chemistry, or a number of other things, there may be an online course for it to get you started. While most offerings don’t have a professor in the same sense a course at a university does (and if they do, they likely don’t have the same credentials), you can still find people who will be willing to help you get past areas where you may find yourself stuck. Most courses are listed on a separate website, http://universityofreddit.com (which is not actually affiliated with Reddit, just this particular subbreddit), though new courses are often introduced on /r/universityofreddit as well.
I think it’s worth noting that you will likely learn quite a bit about people by interacting with them elsewhere as well, just as you would anytime you interact with other people. I chose these places specifically for the focus they place on some aspect of life that makes them good resources for improving yourself in some way. Obviously, these are all essentially web forums and anyone can post there, so you still have to use good judgement. But between the advice offered by these communities and the discussions they have, there’s a good deal to learn if you know how to see what is good, and these communities generally seem to have a good signal to noise ratio.