Hey Reddit...

Sometime in the fall I finally got into Reddit.  If you're familiar with it, you probably know that around that time, tons of former Digg were jumping ship after a terrible site redesign.  I wasn't actually part of the wave of internet immigrants, though--I just went to Digg so many times in one day in the summer that I was bored enough to try Reddit, which I initially hated because of it's simplistic site design.  I still didn't like it, but I started to notice that the old joke about how Digg was just Reddit two days later was actually pretty true, so eventually I just dealt with the site design and went straight to Reddit.  Now even the design has grown on me and I kill way more time on Reddit than I'd like to admit.

If you're not familiar with Reddit, it's sort of like one huge forum.  People post links, pictures, videos, etc. and the community comments on them and votes them up or down based on the quality of the content (in theory).  There's also something they call the hivemind---a sort of mob mentality that's often reflected in the front page.  Reddit tends to go a little crazy about some things and forget that not everyone in the real world shares the opinions of their majority.  For example, Redditors called out the recent trend of setting Facebook profile pictures to cartoon characters to combat child abuse as being pointless--it's not actually helping any children.  So they made fun of it and as one user found, non-Reddit users didn't really appreciate the joke.  He made fun of it on Facebook and several people had negative comments.


Okay, this was supposed to be a long-winded post, but my laptop is being intolerably slow with Blogger right now, so I'm going to cut this short.  Reddit occassionally freaks out about something and then gets distracted.  Reddit tends to lean to the left, and the hivemind was mostly upset about the results of the most recent election.  Right until the TSA began using backscatter machines and began to include a lot more groping in their standard procedure, and Reddit found its new thing to be mad about.

I don't have much of an opinion on it--I don't fly often.  I've flown twice in my life, once in fifth grade, and once for my honeymoon.  But I did think that the hivemind was overreacting a bit--I don't think the TSA procedures are the end of human rights as we know them.  I thought that it wouldn't take long for the right people to get angry and sure enough, lawsuits are already surfacing. 

But the hivemind doesn't completely dominate, and Reddit's still a pretty good source of real debate, and their latest topic has been Wikileaks.  And this time, they've nailed it.  This really is huge--what happens to Wikileaks could set a precedent that would permanently affect the internet and what restrictions are put on it.

It took fifteen minutes to write the last two paragraphs, so I'm not going to go into it any further here.  If you don't know what's going on with Wikileaks, check it out.  Head to Reddit and read up on some of the debates.  Get more than one side of the story.  I'll try to post what I think of it all when I can type a sentence without waiting two minutes for it to show up.