Do you like news? Or My Little Pony? Or politics? Or bigotry? Then the Reddit culture may be for you. With over 100,000 subreddit pages for every possible interest group, the social news website can gobble up the time of any visitor with ease. It’s a double edged sword that most of us will draw upon at one point or another, whether it be to ask advice on purchasing new camera gear or merely looking at memes of grumpy cat.

I first visited Reddit while researching this article, under the frankly silly impression that I would be immune to the wiles of one of the more notorious internet timewasters around. After coming upon a couple subreddits of interest, solely for the purpose of legitimately understanding its nature, I came upon /r/coffee. Not being one to turn anything coffee-related away, I took a gander at the pages upon pages of posts. A couple hours later, I returned to my studies with a greater respect for the gargantuan beast I was sent to dissect.

For all of its dubiously meritorious timewasting abilities, Reddit carries with it a host of unsavory elements. To say nothing of the thankfully defunct /r/jailbait, the undertones of misogyny in the community are prevalent, whether it be subreddits such as /r/MensRights or mere comments on totally platonic posts. Other subreddits have been banned over the years due to incitements of violence against minorities and similar instances of bigotry.

However, it is difficult to control such a culture of hatred on a site devoted to free speech. Reddit makes an active attempt to promote First Amendment rights, even in the light of unseemly behavior, as long as that behavior is within certain bounds. It is essential for Reddit to place trust in the user community to function as a semi-self-regulating body in accordance to natural order.

Like other aspects of the internet, Reddit forms a case study for social interaction in a relatively laissez-faire environment. As such, we are treated to such wonders as the NSFW /r/gonewild and /r/secretsanta, user-generated porn and a community-wide gifting effort, only a dash of keys apart. The community has a will of its own, equal parts Machiavellian and altruistic depending on the day. The year 2010 saw Reddit at its best when users generated over $600,000 for Stephen Colbert’s “Restoring Truthiness” campaign, the result of Reddit user mrsammercer’s dream of “Stephen Colbert hosting a mock rally in response to Glenn Beck’s [August 28, 2010] Restoring Honor event in Washington, D.C,” according to Megan Friedman in an article for Time Magazine.

To call the Reddit community active is, at times, an understatement. However, the constant process of up- and down-voting posts, while effective for filtering the news, has a tendency to succumb easily to the bandwagon effect. In light of the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, /r/findbostonbombers pointed fingers at a number of false perpetrators, leading to a number of death threats. Reddit’s strongest element all-too-often becomes its weakest. Sensationalism runs rampant in the wake of entertainment, often without heeding the truth.

Recently, Time Magazine published an article on a California man who was driving his bear through traffic in Huntington Beach, California. Samantha Grossman writes, “thanks to an intrepid Reddit user, we now know that a man in a yellow Lamborghini was blocking traffic because he had a bear in the passenger seat. Like, a straight-up, actual bear.” Whether the post was intended to be tongue-in-cheek or not is dubious, but the general reliability of Time as a news source marks it as a legitimate story. Unfortunately, it was later revealed that the bear itself is stuffed, and the photograph was staged, thus contributing to the ongoing trend of false news stories stemming from Reddit and other user-generated sites. The window for the timeliness of news continues to shrink as technology improves, and as a result, reporters often throw aside accuracy for alacrity and entertainment value.

Regardless of the occasional missteps it makes,Reddit does its job well at its most basic level: entertainment. The idea that such a land of opportunity exists for all of us, regardless of our interests, is both terrifying and wonderful. We cannot underestimate the value of finding like-minded individuals with whom to indulge our interests, especially when we know that we might not find fans of off-color Latvian jokes and Weimaraners in our physical, day-to-day lives.

Admittedly, reddit.com, like marathon sessions of South Park or Jersey Shore, becomes sickening over time. There is only so much mindless material an intelligent mind can take in before screaming for an end to it all, or even closing its internet browser. When we can no longer distinguish our one-hundred-fifty subreddit tabs from one another, it is most definitely time to unplug, shut down, walk out, and enjoy the brisk winter air.