The user count reads “679 Seawolves” at http://reddit.com/r/sbu, a two-year-old page on the popular user-generated social news website Reddit.

The forum, or subreddit, is one of more than 200,000 on the website, whose topics range from atheism to photography. This one is for Stony Brook students and others to ask questions, post news and share experiences from the university.

On March 8, some of the top posts included a new part-time grad student asking about SOLAR, a student looking for an iPod she lost at the Campus Recreation Center and a user interested in starting a board game club.

Though the subreddit is relatively small compared to giants like AdviceAnimals, which has more than 2,000,000 users, it is average in size compared to other college subreddits, the largest of which have more than 5,000 users.

Subreddits are not unlike Facebook groups, where users can submit content and comment on posts. Subreddits, however, are unique in that other users can nudge content up or down on a page by up voting or down voting. This user-regulated curating system effectively moves only the best content to the top of the page, resulting in Reddit’s self-title, “the front page of the internet.”

One of the side effects of this system is a very high standard for content, which makes websites like Facebook and Tumblr a topic of disdain for a large portion of Reddit users who view content generated on these sites as inferior. For some, Reddit is an alternative community to other social media website.

The SBU subreddit is also associated with a Stony Brook peer-to-peer file sharing network run using the Alliance file sharing client. The network was started by one of the subreddit’s moderators, Spiderman_, who has also created an Stony Brook internet relay chat room (IRC) operated on the IRC hosting website SlashNET.