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Social bookmarking site Reddit has finally jumped ahead of its rivals and outgrown puberty.

While Digg is infamously homophobic and Fark deeply misogynistic, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a mainstream social bookmarking site that not only tolerates but actually welcomes LGBT and feminist content.

Reddit underwent a redesign this week, and has emerged with a triumphant new feature: users can now tick which types of content they want to read. So no more trawling through endless Ron Paul and 9/11 conspiracy stories to get to what you actually want to read. Unless Ron Paul and 9/11 are what you actually want to read, of course.

There are many many types of content to subscribe to in the new Reddit, including, to our surprise and delight, ‘LGBT‘ and ‘feminisms‘. (We’re not sure why there’s a plural there, one feminism would’ve been sufficient, but let’s not complain.)

These categories are currently pretty underused - at time of writing there were 580 Reddit users signed up for the LGBT news, and 441 for feminisms, compared to 10,380 in the ‘WTF’ category and 3,020 just for ‘lolcats’ . But hopefully as word gets out, more LGBT and feminist bloggers/website pubishers/readers will use the categories and build their success.

Why we don’t Digg Farking Kirtsy

Social bookmarking sites are great for discovering new content on the web, often from unusual sources you would never have found before. They’re also a great way for writers and publishers to promote their work. But the problem, as many LGBT and female writers have found, is that the majority of these user-generated sites are dominated by straight men. Or more precisely, straight, homophobic, misogynistic, immature boys who think the internet is their playground and no one elses.

This leads to a situation where an innocent list of the top 10 websites for women receives 781 hateful comments on Fark, and countless lesbian culture blogs are banned from Digg, (although faux lesbians are always welcome.) Kirtsy (formerly known as Sk*rt) tries to be ‘the Digg for girls’, but that just seems to add to the problem: it implicitly implies that Digg is not for us, and really we should just quietly get out of the way and stick to our own pastel-shaded sites if we want to swap diet tricks and knitting patterns.

What do you think? Do you use any of these sites to discover new stuff, or to promote stuff you like? Are there any others which are more useful? Will you be using the new and improved Reddit?

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