For those of you who enjoy an alternative to social networking like Reddit, I’m sure you probably think it’s an awesome site for finding new and interesting information. While that may be true, I’m here to give you 7 reasons as to why you shouldn’t focus your social networking efforts towards Reddit as it will be a complete waste of your time.

1. It’s A Cluster Fuck – Pardon the language, but it’s necessary here. First off, there’s way to much going on with this site. While back in the day it could serve more of a benefit, the amount of CRAP submitted gives you very little to zero chance of you getting recognition for something valuable that you submit.

2. It’s A Closed Community – While anyone can join, they have rules out the ass in every subreddit for the most part in regards to what you can and can’t submit. By the time you find where you’re content should go, you’ll become more frustrated rather than wanting to participate like most social sites encourage.

3.Play By My Rules, Or Get Out – This should really be their tagline. Besides having links for reddiquette, rules, and their FAQ, you’re restricted by not only how often you can post, but how often you can leave comments. I’ve seen many posts about how this drives people insane. You need to increase your Karma to post and comment more. That would be like Twitter restricting how often you can post a tweet. There’s a reason that this site is filled with a young crowd and doesn’t really see any predominant social media “power” users on the site.

4. Photo Nonsense – If you don’t plan on “photo bombing” the website, than Reddit is not going to be the place for you. Photos (funny and serious) seem to be the lead content submissions on the site. That can get really old after a while and wouldn’t you like to go on the site and find something valuable?

5. You’re Being Watched – While I believe it’s a good thing for a community to have moderators and make sure we’re keeping the spammers out, Reddit moderators will jump on you in a heart beat for submitting too many things to your own work. If you’re providing something useful, it’s not spam, especially if you’re not doing it to make a profit off people. I once submitted two links to my own work and a Reddit moderator reported it and provided me with no reasoning when I questioned it.

6. The Design Sucks – When you try to decide whether or not a new social media service is going to be right for you, I’m sure you usually take note of the design. Everyone typically does. If it’s too cluttered and busy, why would you want to stick around. Reddit is not inviting in the slightest, it’s overwhelming and I don’t know where to start. Not to mention, it took me a while to figure out how to find subreddits. For me, that’s a bad user experience.

7. Smaller Subreddits Don’t Matter – If you think that you could leverage the smaller subreddits to maybe get feedback on a graphic you created, most likely it will go unnoticed regardless of how long it sits in the “new” section. You really have to pray and hope that if you submit something that it gets recognized in one of the main reddits where ACTIVE users are.

While Reddit has been known to drive a lot of traffic and attention for some, many people struggle with finding the best ways to use the site. I say don’t waste your time. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack and most of the time, your content becomes buried in the haystack. You’d be much better off trying to focus your efforts with sites like Twitter or Facebook.

If you do use Reddit, tell me why. If you’ve had success with it, I’d like to know. This post isn’t meant to be a rant even though I did curse a little. Rather, it’s my passion for social media and me wanting to help prevent you from wasting your time on a social network that isn’t going to provide you with a long term benefit like some of the better sites will.