Hi, I would not mind if you can forward me to a previous post that has asked this.
I will be explaining my post but before that let me preface this. I am a student in the accounting field. I just took a Canadian History course this term because of some synergistic reasons that I will not get into. I am a frustrated person when it comes to writing. It is a two-sided issue. First, I love sharing my insights and stuff and writing it. Second, and the reason why I hate writing is that when I submit my paper I am super confident and happy that I got to share my thoughts with my creative writing/history prof, but then my paper comes back with red marks saying I totally missed the point. It breaks my heart.
Now that is over with, I am asking this because as we all know Reddit posts is not exactly something you should cite in your papers as it is not a credible scholarly article. I do concur with the fact that there is very in-depth and accurate regurgitated information with citations on some posts. My question is how do I go on about playing these regurgitated and condensed information that has been posted. Should I bypass the post and just go to the citation and read the sources (I feel this is disingenuous to the OP and could constitute plagiarism)? My problem with this solution is I most often than not come with the same conclusion as the posts here so I think I should give them credit.
note: I know I should do my own papers, but I did that in the past and always got bad marks. I read some information here and I always think that could've been a good part of my previous paper. Also, I am not looking into actively getting others to do my assignment/paper I am talking about information posted here and looking at the direction they are going towards and finding my own interpretations.
tl;dr: Can I cite use the information given here and if yes how do I cite them.
but then my paper comes back with red marks saying I totally missed the point.
This is a bit of a red flag, as it sounds like you may benefit more from consulting with Professors-- or at least asking for clarification. Ideally if you were my student, I would ask you to write out a bullet point outline for your essay with an opening paragraph so I could let you know if you've missed the point or have found yourself going down a rabbit hole with no bearing on the topic. I will always look at a rough draft for a student (assuming they get it to me with plenty of time before the deadline so that I can mark it and return it to them) and you may want to inquire if your professors would consider this as well.
Should I bypass the post and just go to the citation and read the sources
Ideally yes. Youre not plagiarizing a reddit post if you look at the citations and come to the same conclusion, especially as we are typically dealing with citations of secondary sources/other historians and not primary sources. Plagarization would be lifting the text from the reddit post and claiming it as your own. The virtue in following the citation as opposed to just citing a summary of the source on reddit, is the ability of another scholar, in this case your professor, to look at the citation and recognize the scholar, author, or work being cited without necessarily having to go look it up. Or, if they are unfamiliar with the work/author they can easily find out how the book has been received and even look up the author and their qualifications regarding the subject matter. An anonymous reddit post provides none of this, which is why on reddit posts you do not usually come across original scholarship-- rather flairs link back to the published work of historians whose identities are public and whose publications have been reviewed.
As u/BluePenguin points out, you can certainly cite AH, and how you do it will tend to be a bit cumbersome, and will depend on what sort of citation system your course or your professor chooses to specify.
Among the most common are Harvard and MLA. This post would be cited as follows in each of these:
Harvard
The style is: Author surname, author initial. (Year published). Title in italics. Available at: [web address without http:// or https://] [Date accessed]
So your bibliography would contain the following entry:
u/TheDegy [2019]. Can I and How Do I Cite from this Subreddit? Available at www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ahdscs/can_i_and_how_do_i_cite_from_this_subreddit/ [Accessed 19 Jan. 2019]
and your in-text cite would be [u/TheDegy, 2019].
MLA
This style is better suited to the way Reddit works. The style is: Account holder username. 'Title in Roman type between inverted commas.' Site, Date published. URL [again without http:// or https://].
You'd add a footnote number at the appropriate point and the footnote would read:
There's a slightly different form for comments on a main post. My comment would be cited as follows:
You can use the "share" button below the post to obtain and copy the link to a given comment.