14 March 2008
I’m done with reddit.
I went to an extreme this week: I force quitted myself of the reddit habit. Reddit, if you’re somehow unfamiliar, is a social news aggregation website: members can rank user-submitted headlines that correspond to stories, images, and the like. In theory, the top 25 articles at any moment, the newspaper “front page” serves as a more interesting and timely version of reddit’s print, or even online, brethren; stories make it to the front page of reddit that get missed or dissed elsewhere. In theory, the Reddit community is broad enough to have an expansive worldview: differing thoughtpoints combined into clean, clear HTML and CSS.
I’ve been a reddit user since the early days: I lived through the multiple influxes of users from the much larger (and hence, by the theory of Internet audiences, more juvenile) digg. I lamented the death of the “good article”, the gradual replacement of interesting science and programming content on the frontpage for LOLcats and pictures from Russia. I survived the still-smoldering diatribes on Bush and that fresh minty wonderment of Ron Paul (the man it seems who can do no wrong). None of these were my source of frustration. I’m wholly aware that the “real” Internet is by and large a libertarian community: a free society of free thinkers who feel it should be kept free. It’s abhorrent to hear of police brutality, unfair business practices, and animal abusing Marines. In a sense, I’m glad that there’s a place where these problems appear front and center and are discussed, albeit somewhat sophomorically. Any discussion of a society’s consternations has value.
In openness, two articles I’ve submitted were found interesting enough by the reddit community to appear on the front page: one from the New Yorker called “We are all Larry David” (about how patients in therapy sympathize with the wince-worthy HBO character) and one called “The Man who Unboiled an Egg” from the Observer. Both are verbose, eccentric articles: I found them fascinating and submitted them. Overall, though, my ratio is poor: I’ve submitted other articles more for kicks, in an attempt to get a feel for what sticks with the community. And, in shame, I admit that I’ve submitted no less than three articles from this very blog. None gained any traction (in retrospect, that’s for the best.) I tell you this because I’m not one of those people who quit a community because they feel they’re not being heard. I was heard. I had one-liners and discussions, and reddit, until recently, served me well as an information and entertainment portal.
Reddit, however, has two major problems. One is that it’s very, very good at sucking you in. Any idle minute at my computer found me typing in www.re and selecting the first entry from the FireFox dropdown. Reddit sucks down those five/ten minute blocks in between tasks, then expands to fill the available space. I grew to rely on reddit: feeling uninformed if I didn’t visit at least once or twice a day. Nothing was equal to reddit: digg, the mainstream press, even rolling your own bloglist. I was a Reddit junkie. It eventually dawned on me that Reddit causes the problem it aims to eliminate: getting your information from only one point narrows your worldview.
A great thinker can analyze, critique, and respect a valid argument, and ultimately choose to reject it based on logic. But in order to become a great thinker, one needs to see a plethora of arguments for this process to reach maximal efficiency. Reddit, nor any community big or small, cannot do all the work of presenting arguments for validation: ultimately, any community collapses to the least common demoniator. I found myself blindly accepting those tales of police brutality, unfair business practices, and animal abusing Marines as representative of the whole. The reality painted by Reddit and the actuality of the real world are as opposite as fire and ice, but when you spend the majority of your time in the virtual world and not in the real one, which are you more likely to believe? Fortunately, some real world time gave me the following: I accidentally jaywalked in front of a cop and NOTHING HAPPENED. I bought a video game from Best Buy, set off the electronic sensor on my way out, and the security supervisor WAVED ME THROUGH. My belt set off the metal detector and when I apologized, the TSA representative said it HAPPENS ALL THE TIME. But after spending 20 minutes on Reddit, I’d be pissed as hell at cops, corporations, and corporals. (Sure, you could argue that if any one of these had ended differently, taken to some version of the back room and deprived of rights and freedom, this would be a different post. And I’d agree with you. The point is not that these things never happen, but that these things happen more rarely than Reddit would lead you to believe.)
The other problem is the Reddit community by and large likes to be the show, rather than see the show. Stories on Reddit come with comments, both in the form of editorialized headlines and in threaded conversations on reddit’s site. Additionally, Reddit allows (and I’d argue encourages) “self” posting, in which there’s no story, just a conversation. Some of these are interesting, others hilarious, but most are just venting and ad-hoc emotional votes. Here’s three of the latter type (from recent memory):
“Vote up if you don’t give a flying fuck about the Oscars.”
“Vote up if you’re not watching the Super Bowl.”
“Vote up if you think BUSH and CHENEY should be IMPEACHED!”
All three of these, if memory serves me correctly, were at or near the top of the front page. Maybe I’m not the audience: I watched the Oscars and the Super Bowl, and I’d think it’d be a major destabilization to an already shaky economy to remove the President from power or even force the administration to think about preparing a defense. (Granted, I’m not sold on that last one.) These “votes”, just as unscientific and uninteresting as the Ron Paul debate spamming polls, consistently get voted up to the top. Talking about the news is one thing, seeking confirmation that, indeed, other members of the community have the same ideologies as you is entirely something else. Ultimately, these were what drove me away; if the cream of an organization’s output is that we should “chimpeach the chimperor” instead of have a debate about the merits and shortcomings of the current administration, then what can you possibly learn by staying in that community?
So I’m done. I’ve blocked reddit at work (by routing the URL to the loopback address) and at home (by blocking it at the router). I’ve been gone for a week and already, I feel less angsty. Don’t get me wrong, the first 48 hours were hell: withdrawl sucks. But I can already feel the mindrot receeding. I’m not going to bitch about it at reddit, because I don’t feel the community wants to change.
I, however, do.
Technorati Tags: Reddit, addiction, Ron Paul
:: Adam
14 March 2008 @ 7:27 pm
Reddit is democracy. You sound like you want “your” point of view and nothing else.
You mention Ron Paul many times. He got alot of votes (10% in some states), but did you ever once hear the main stream media talk about him without scorn? But on Reddit, he gets a fair shake. He’s a nut, but atleast we heard him out, instead of shunning him as the MSM did.
You’ll also never hear about the total collapse of the dollar and the end of US hegemony on the MSM, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. (or maybe it isn’t, but they never even mention the possibility, which is very real)
So, I say, go back to being a sheep. Listen to your corporate masters. Or better yet, do what most americans do. Tune out. Ignore the planet you live on. Buy another SUV. How about those Giants… $4 gas? Let’s see what ABC has to say about it….
14 March 2008 @ 7:45 pm
reddit has become much different. “Oversensationalized” and “premature” comes to mind. This past few months, because of the elections, have been extra grueling.
14 March 2008 @ 8:07 pm
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120527756506928579-3wNdJRXhkpLqY4EDBt4j3ly1foo_20090312.html?mod=rss_free
14 March 2008 @ 8:24 pm
bye
14 March 2008 @ 8:25 pm
I can sympathize. One year ago on Reddit I could submit a link to my latest blog entry and expect over 200 additional unique visits to my website. I even had 5 of my own articles make the front page at one time or another, causing traffic spikes ranging from 30-50 thousand visitors in a day. Nowadays, I simply can’t compete against the large number of Reddit users with Internet Attention Deficit Disorder. They seem to want nothing but [PIC]s, and consequently the links to my lengthy, self-written content gets downvoted immediately. I respect and understand your decision to leave the community.
14 March 2008 @ 10:01 pm
Can you help us build an alternative at jaanix?
14 March 2008 @ 10:09 pm
Hey, I remember that egg article. Fascinating stuff, exactly what I like to read on reddit… sorry to hear that you are leaving.
Something we all have to remember when reading the news (from any source) is that the world is a big place & only the exceptions to the norm are ‘newsworthy’. That is, 99% of the time everything proceeds peacefully and smoothly, just as it should, and it’s only the 1% that makes the front page (of reddit, or your newspaper, or whatever). So, news, far from being an accurate representation of the world around you, is actually just a compendium of atypical events. Something I try to keep in mind anyway…
14 March 2008 @ 10:19 pm
pweese come back! pweese pweese!
what a schmuck! if you are done, leave and don’t both to post about it.
14 March 2008 @ 10:51 pm
Influx brings ignorance. Migration brings malignancy.
It’s as though the well articulated community that once thrived on intellectual conversation has been replaced with a generation of uninitiated people who find it easier to inject feeble attempts at humor into converstations rather than post a reply that is substantiated with even the smallest inkling of intelligence. While there are attempts to create new communities that are more centered around such things, the inevitable will happen, popularity will set in and the new migration will begin. Moderation could be suggested as a solution, however it would require a massive group of people to control such a large crowd which would inevitably lead to superiority complexes among those in power and biased towards ideas that are contradictory to their own.
The simple truth is that reddit (and digg alike) have jumped the proverbial shark and proven that community based quality content is fleeting and Eternal September marches on.
14 March 2008 @ 10:53 pm
nice article. look more into that dialectic as you talked about multiple view points. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic
later
johnny
14 March 2008 @ 10:59 pm
This post has hit #23 on reddit, and its rising fast. You might be done with reddit, but reddit’s not done with you!
14 March 2008 @ 11:10 pm
waaaaaaaaaah
14 March 2008 @ 11:31 pm
This is one of the web’s most interesting stories on Sat 15th Mar 2008…
These are the web’s most talked about URLs on Sat 15th Mar 2008. The current winner is …..
14 March 2008 @ 11:55 pm
Very annoying. You really don’t want to prosecute the President, despite million dead, trillions wasted, torture and spying, because it’ll “destabilize” the country? So exactly what crimes would one have to commit to be removed from office?
We impeached Clinton over nothing a few years ago; I didn’t the see the country “destabilized”.
If the only content that came out of Reddit was “jail the criminal who caused hundreds of thousands of deaths”, I’d be *proud* to be a member.
Tell me; what do *you* have to offer us, o wise one? You’re _so_ much smarter than we are; your contempt is for us is palpable; how would you fix the issue of a maverick, kill-crazy President who has stated time and again that he doesn’t believe the law applies to him?
15 March 2008 @ 12:03 am
but where will you get your lolcats?
15 March 2008 @ 12:09 am
Hey, there has to be some place for anti-corporation and anti-establishment people to congregate. Reddit serves its purpose.
But yeah, your mistake was having this as your only source of information/discussion. You’d have been just as ill-served if you made Fox News your only source. Balance!!
15 March 2008 @ 1:22 am
I agree full heartedly with you.
I have to say that this is what usually happens when a community grows to an uncontrollable size.
The same thing happened to Digg, is happening to ./ and Reddit.
Like #16 said, Reddit has served it’s purpose well as a gathering spot for anti-establishment people, the occasional “lol look at this funny picture” article and “vote up if you …” page, and this is really not something i’m looking forward to in the near future for Reddit.
15 March 2008 @ 2:27 am
I go to reddit only occasionally, but I agree with your observation that much of reddit’s discussion is sensationalized and based only partly in reality. Sure, there is police brutality, but reading reddit would lead you to believe that it happens all the time and that all police officers are monsters.
This, I could deal with. The main reason I tend to keep my distance from reddit is the overwhelming love of Ron Paul. Stories about him are fine, but there’s a point where I draw the line. I think the moment that convinced me to stay away from reddit for a while was when a post entitled like “Ron Paul Takes Minnesota!!!” was getting quite a few votes. See, he _didn’t_ take Minnesota (obviously). The person looked at the website, with ~0% of polls reporting, and saw that Paul’s name was on top. They then assumed Paul won, so they rushed to reddit to celebrate. If those are the types of members that decide what gets to the front page, I’m not sure I want to waste my time with the site.
Luckily, not all of reddit is like that. The key is to not rely too much on reddit. I’ll occasionally find some interesting things on the front page, or maybe I’ll skim through a few pages. It’s a great site to check once or twice a day when you’re bored. If it is your main source of news, you’ll get a flawed perspective on reality.
15 March 2008 @ 2:36 am
I wrote that “Welcome to the New Reddit” article the other week…looks like more and more people are getting frustrated with the site.
I haven’t quit it yet, but I find it easier and easier to stay away. It used to be this unending fount of new information. But these days, it’s monotone. The same narrow opinions hammered away at, again and again.
15 March 2008 @ 2:41 am
… wow!
I posted it to reddit to be ironic. I didn’t do anything to promote it. And it made the frontpage!
If you have any bandwidth overage fees I can help you out. Just let me know. (I really have no idea how big the reddit effect is)
15 March 2008 @ 2:48 am
Awesome post! Well written, and a very timely description of reddit. True, the front page which used to be so good is gone now. In fact, the first 75 stories are mostly crap at the moment. But you can still use self.reddit to create your own tailored home page, which is, sadly, how I now have to use my beloved reddit.
15 March 2008 @ 3:03 am
i agree, it’s a good idea to stop browsing reddit. its range of content is getting narrower and the signs of hive-mind are becoming obvious even to people who don’t care all that much about that kind of thing.
i recommend you use a meta-aggregator, a page that takes many aggregators, with their different communities and scopes of content, and, well, aggregates them.
i recommend you check out popurls.com. right now it displays the 40 (or so) most recent headlines from the following aggregators on its front page:
digg, reddit, delicious, propellor, truemors, boingboing, slashdot, metafilter, fark, wired, google news, yahoo news, newsvine, tailrank, huffington, stumbleupon, (and a few more i can’t recall off the top of my head).
it also has a selection of currently popular media from flickr, youtube, metacafe, last.fm, and some other media sites.
and at the bottom it has a bunch of links to the most recent feature of daily updated thingies, such as the onion, lifehacker, howstuffworks, and about 30 more.
also i’ll mention that this is all on the main page, which takes about 600k to load and is quite pleasing to the eye imo.
reddit is just a tiny slice of what’s going on, popurls gives a much broader picture of the goings on on the internet.
i won’t benefit at all from typing this out, i just thought you sounded like you needed something better than reddit.
15 March 2008 @ 5:32 am
Thanks for this post, because of it I questioned many of my own opinions. And while I do agree with your motives and also miss the early reddit, I would need a reddit replacement before moving on. Most days a little metafilter.com and aldaily.com will balance out the un-editorialized reddit shrill.
15 March 2008 @ 6:20 am
Well written post; smart for you to have shut reddit down. Hey “justme”: the writer mentions Ron Paul twice; it could be argued that twice is “many”; hell, Dworkin argued that het intercourse is rape and there have been laws written based on such idiocy. Go flush your head. Meanwhile, seems none of the repliers have caught the concept that the author is talking about addiction, not viewpoints or politics. I have just recently found reddit and find it, along with my bleeding liberal radio, NPR, to be a refreshing balance to the zenophobic, racist, homophobic viewpoints I suffer through in a union construction trade. Any informed mind would tire of it but I have no tv at the moment so it’s useful to have some idea what’s happening “out there”. How about ya live and let live?
Happy Trails!
15 March 2008 @ 6:41 am
i can sympathise with some of the things you are saying.
but overall i think the “problem” is not reddit. its the way you used it. for example, i am also a reddit addict. but every day i also check at least 5 other RSS feeds from various sources (BBC, AP, CNN, local news, you choose). this keeps a balance.
like with all things in life, you need to find what is good measure. of course you know better for yourself..
on a second note, i will have to agree with Tom. how can you complain about the efforts to impeach the current US administration? Even if it does destabilise your country -which is absurd, bush is destabilising (destroying?) it himself at a very fast rate. can you say debt or foreign policy?- getting rid of this administration is perhaps the most righteous thing for an american to do. Pardon me for the poor irony, but you must have been living in a cave for the last 7 years if you dont see why this is.
Giannis, Greece.
15 March 2008 @ 7:13 am
Reddit does have a problem with its political content – it tends to be extremely left of center (pro-Palestinian, anti-Bush, and at times antisemitic) and divorced from reality (there are nice cops out there). Reddit is NOT a democracy, it is a small, self-selected community that acts like a mob and votes and comments.
15 March 2008 @ 7:26 am
Well said. I think you made excellent observations about your behavior and reddit. I can relate to much of it.
15 March 2008 @ 7:30 am
Nice little storm you’ve generated here.
15 March 2008 @ 8:41 am
I’m a moderate liberal. I have watched with pain the way Reddit has been hijacked by the extremes of political spectrum. I have also watched Ron Paul rise and fall. And anytime I see any articles that have to with these topics (Ron Paul, police ‘brutality’, government ‘corruption’), I vote it down. Hopefully, I’m making a difference.
15 March 2008 @ 8:50 am
Hi there. I agree with you somewhat. Reddit has become the sort of source where it only takes 10-15 seconds to skim the articles a day and find maybe one or two amusing images or couple of 2 paragraph articles.
Like you said, it’s good for getting rid of a couple minutes. Digg seems to leech more of my time but half of it I feel is spent on articles I’m not interested due to US politics. I like keeping up to date to some extent about it but being from the UK, there’s only so much I can take!
I hope someone who genuinely found this article informative submitted it to reddit and not you or some associate
15 March 2008 @ 9:22 am
There’s no doubting reddit would be a much better site without the echo from empty vessels. Well written and well said.
15 March 2008 @ 9:52 am
If I ever get the courage to go cold turkey off reddit, can I ask you to be my sponsor?
It’s been clear that the number of dissatisfied users has been steadily increasing, and I think reactions like this are becoming commonplace. I’m not surprised that they’re starting to allow “private” subreddits. I’ve been thinking for some time that this would be the way to go. It’s horribly elitist but, frankly, it’s the only way to prevent being inundated with the type of submissions and comments that ruin the experience.
I really don’t have the energy to cultivate my own private subreddits, so for now I’m hoping I’ll eventually get invited to ones that are more representative of my tastes.
Take heart, there’s many of us in the same boat!
15 March 2008 @ 4:11 pm
That is way more of a convincing argument then the ones the intellectual elitists put forward. I do not have a problem with vacuousness, it is a fact of life, I often chuckle at lolcats as a guilty pleasure, sadly…one just has to navigate through it. I think however you are making a mistake, you admit that just because the injustices aren’t happening to you doesn’t mean they aren’t happening, but you would rather just forget about them for the sake of not feeling depressed? That is the problem with westerners. They never allow themselves to get passionate enough to interfere with their comfortable lives. If it makes you sad, angsty, or angry, get out and do something about it!
15 March 2008 @ 7:31 pm
[...] my skepticism of social media took root, and it was deepened considerably when I read Adam College’s post about why he’s done with reddit. Last time I was pulled over by a cop, he told me that my license plate lights were out and one of [...]
27 August 2009 @ 5:18 pm
I’m done with reddit, too. a bunch of idiots if you ask me.
21 March 2010 @ 12:44 am
I quit reddit.com after the users went on a witch hunt against me and removed my moderator powers. Fuck them and fuck reddit.
21 March 2010 @ 12:45 am
I wquit reddit.com after the users went on a witch hunt against me and removed my moderator powers. Fuck them and fuck reddit.w
22 March 2010 @ 4:31 pm
Conducting an informal tabulation of why people think reddit sucks, check it out!
http://www.redditsucks.com