In 2005, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian launched a simple link-sharing site. Since then, Reddit has grown from a small community of mostly programmers to a mega-hive with somewhere around half a billion active users worldwide. If you’re not one of those half billion, don’t worry; it’s never too late to jump in, poke around, and see if Reddit is for you.

Reddit can be daunting at first: it’s huge, and the standards and expectations aren’t like other social networks. This guide will cover the basics of starting a Reddit account, finding and joining relevant communities, posting content, and earning Reddit karma; you’ll be upvoting, posting content, and making unfunny jokes in comment sections like a seasoned Redditor in no time.

At a basic level, Reddit is a community-driven platform comprised of user-created message boards (called subreddits or communities) that cover just about any topic you can think of, from the broadest interests to the most niche concerns. Users can post photos, text, videos, and links for other users to interact with and comment on. That’s the bare bones explanation, but it’s a bit like saying New York City is “a bunch of streets and buildings.” At a deeper level, Reddit is the collective mind of the internet, maintaining a constant, ongoing conversation about everything.

Internet forums have been around since the 1970s, but Reddit improved upon the model with a voting system that allows users to upvote or downvote content based on criteria of their choosing. In theory, this results in the most relevant, useful, engaging, and interesting content being highlighted, while content that is low-effort, off-topic, and less useful is hidden. All without the need for a central authority to control what people see. (In theory.)