EDITORIAL
We experienced a strong surge in visits to our site the other day and noticed that two of our editorials (here and here) were picked up by a member of Reddit, a community news service within a crowded field of Digg imitators that provides a forum for its members to troll the Internet for stories that inform, educate, piss them off or make them laugh - and then post them to Reddit for fellow members to vote up or down as germaine.
We thank him or her for submitting our editorials to the forum, but the only problem with any of these community news services is not just what their members consider germaine - but more importantly, what essentially amounts to a mob mentality that drives and determines what is Reddit-worthy.
We'll briefly explain.
The Digg, Newsvine and Reddit business models are pretty much based on the democratization of news, which just means that all of us are tired of newspaper and television editors filtering what they think we should or should not read or hear about. So as we said, Digg's, Reddit's and Newsvine's registered members troll the Internet for news stories that inform, educate, piss them off or make them laugh, then their systems allow their respective members to vote the submitted stories up or down - which then determines whether those stories rise to the privilege of the Front Page . . . or get buried in infinitely long back pages. Oh, anyone who comments on that story can also be praised or buried as well.
Sounds like the ultimate in democracy, huh? Well, consider this, something that has been raised by other critics for a long time.
By voting on each story with merely a thumbs-up or down, Digg, Newsvine, Reddit and others like them allow only those stories or opinions that meet the acceptable political beliefs of the like-minded majority of its members that happen to be online at any particular moment. And if that majority is of a particular political persuasion - then any story that represents an opposing point-of-view usually gets buried faster than an IM.
Intellectually, whether from the Right or the Left, that's pretty much a fascist mentality, a let's suppress the opposition, if you're not with us yer agin' us sort of thinking, of no use to anyone as it fails to enlighten, a little-used word within the fringes of extremist Left or Right-wing thinking. After all, haven't we all (note: as mature adults) had conversations with people we've politically disagreed with, but who nevertheless made some fascinating points? Not to convert you - but to give you an additional perspective? That's called a discourse, something scholars have enjoyed with one another since Plato, Aristotle and Socrates - and how a truly free and democratic society actually moves forward.
But unfortunately, after looking at the stories submitted, the sources quoted and the comments made on Reddit's entire site that day, it looks as if a mob mentality of one particular political persuasion had indeed taken over. As far as we could tell, there were no comments from what could be considered the middle or the right, so it's a real reach to say that what Reddit was doing at that moment was truly democracy in action.
Anyway, for those on Reddit who buried our stories, again, we're honored to have been featured, but couldn't you guys have just stayed longer than the 5 seconds max each of you apparently spent (as per our internal stats) to read the more than 800 words we carefully crafted to represent all points-of-view - before you drew your uninformed conclusions and posted your derrogatory comments based entirely on your assumptions of what the headline spoke of?
Be proud, dudes. You understand the true spirit of a democracy.
[sigh, we're doomed]