How might you teach parts of this course to a friend new to Reddit?

Teaching Reddit to someone new is most effective when you begin with the underlying logic of the platform rather than its mechanics. New users who understand why Reddit is organized into communities, why karma exists, and why community-specific norms matter can navigate most practical situations on their own, even when the specific interface element or rule they encounter is new to them. Starting with "here is how to create an account and submit a post" front-loads mechanics before context, which produces users who can technically operate the platform but keep making cultural errors they do not understand. Concrete, hands-on walkthroughs are more effective than explanations for most platform features. Sitting with a new user — in person or via screen share — and navigating to a few communities they are already interested in, reading through recent posts together, and pointing out the signals that indicate a community's culture (flair usage, question quality, comment tone, sidebar rules) gives them pattern recognition that abstract instruction does not. Showing them how to evaluate whether a question has already been answered, how to find a community's wiki, and how to read AutoModerator responses turns passive observation into practical skill. For the parts of this course that cover edge cases and troubleshooting, the most effective teaching approach is to tell a story rather than present a rule. Explaining what happens when someone's post disappears — the multiple possible causes and how to diagnose each one — through a narrative of a specific scenario is more memorable than presenting a taxonomy of Reddit errors. Friends who learn Reddit through stories of things that go wrong and how to handle them are better prepared for the inevitable first bump than friends who only learn the ideal-case workflow. The capstone questions in this module are particularly useful as teaching prompts: asking a new Reddit user to answer "which three communities best align with your current goals?" before they join anything forces the same kind of intentionality that experienced users develop only after years of trial and error.