Americans are flocking to this unlikely source for finance advice

Stephanie Asymkos

  • Reddit’s active user base made over 1.2 billion comments on the site in 2018.

  • One of Reddit’s fastest-growing communities of the year was a thread on the topic of personal finance.

  • The site clocked an impressive 30 percent growth from 2017.

A record number of people are turning to Reddit to get their personal finance questions answered.

Based on information and statistics released in December 2018 from Reddit’s “Year in Review: 2018,” PovertyFinance, a personal finance thread with 131,000 subscribers, took the No. 5 spot for largest new communities by subscribers last year.

A user’s Reddit pursuits can be trivial or intellectual, and millions of users are now leaning into the site for financial advice. The subreddit r/personalfinance has 13.5 million subscribers who share tips on how to prepare low-cost meals, getting out of credit card debt, plan for retirement and more.

As of November 2018, there had been:

  • 153 million posts to Reddit for the year

  • 1.2 billion comments

  • 27 billion votes

In 2018, Reddit adapted a massive site redesign, intelligent search functionality and a low-light feature that was a welcomed advancement for night owls. Overall, the site saw a 30 percent increase in views and a 22 percent growth in user engagement from 2017.

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How Reddit Works

Perhaps the best way to understand Reddit is to ask Reddit. The site bills itself as “the front page of the internet.” Reddit is a referential threaded site in which users — the site boasts 330 million monthly active users — share news and anecdotes, discuss, debate and spread content across more than 150,000 active communities, or “subreddits,” which cover a huge range in topics including the growing topic of personal finance.

Find Out: The Internet Is Furious About This Financial Advice

For each Reddit post, users can upvote or downvote. Every vote is counted, and depending on the approval or disapproval of the greater community, that piece of content is more or less visible. The more upvotes a user amasses, the greater their karma or clout in the Reddit community is.

Experts suggest that users exercise caution and judgment when cruising Reddit because the user-generated commentary is exactly that and there are no fact-checkers policing the posts.

Click through to find out if you can pass this finance quiz that most Americans can’t pass.

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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Americans Are Flocking to This Unlikely Source for Finance Advice

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