Posts tagged reddit
I am apalled by some of the immature, horrifically racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnic… posts that are just ignored here. Why are these accounts still active?
While Reddit has done well in getting interest from the mainstream I just wonder if by allowing these children to run rampant and post whatever they feel will cause the most collateral damage if Reddit is biting off it’s own nose in taking that step to become a mainstream community.
William Shatner, Captain, Starship Enterprise, in a comment thread he started on Reddit. Via PandoDaily, William Shatner calls out Reddit for racism and hate mongering.
For the thread and some the 3,100+ comments in it, see here.
FJP: In it, he praises Nordic rationality and The Economist’s recent feature on it, which we also enjoyed reading.
For a long long time, Slate was in a category of one, or maybe 2 (with salon), the online only magazine. What’s been wonderful in the past 7 years has been the emergence of so many healthy, clever, innovative online only sites that are not principally news sites, and the online success of traditional magazines like the atlantic. The health of the category has been good for all of us. There is more advertising, and more readers who now get to read across sites (Slate AND the Atlantic AND HuffPo AND Daily Beast AND Gawker…). More competition has been good for all of us, and forced us to innovate constantly.
Over the last couple years, reddit traffic and usage have continued to grow by leaps and bounds — in October 2012 alone we were up to over 3.8B pageviews and more than 46 million unique visitors. Our server costs also continue to grow, so we have a choice to make: we can start running a bunch more ads, or we can give you, the community, more reasons to support the site with your own money through reddit gold.
Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, blog.reddit.com. Now is the Time… to Invest in Gold.
Avoiding overt commercialization because you’re afraid of alienating your online community is honorable, but it will eventually lead to a big question — where, then, do you make money?
Wong, as Mathew Ingram pointed out earlier today, has subtly reminded users about Reddit Gold, a paid membership that comes with perks. Wong also told readers that, no, they are not a very profitable site. They need help, and so they’re asking members to pay if they can.
Ingram thinks it may work, and that it could even work for news sites:
There’s no question that being a community already gives Reddit a better chance of success with this kind of thing, but it is a model that I think more media companies could implement as well, instead of just putting up a blanket paywall around all of their content. This is the idea behind what Wall Street Journal managing editor Raju Narisetti and author Jeff Jarvis have both called a “reverse paywall” — which provides benefits to loyal users and readers instead of charging them — and it seems like a much better fit if what you want to do is build a relationship with your community.
The key is to build and maintain a community where users are able to build reputations for themselves, either through loyal interaction with content, or continued contribution to the community. Think karma.
It may also be that the community needs a strong membership within its large population. Members with Reddit Gold, however, are no such group. But one user has the right idea — noting that some members occasionally see their own artwork posted without attribution, it was suggested that there be a “creddit” button which links to and gives points, perks, etc. to the members that created the shared work.
As Ingram points out, other robust communities have disappeared after the owner of the site tried to profit from them:
Those kinds of decisions, along with other design-related moves that Digg made, arguably poisoned the site’s relationship with its community to the point where many core users left — in many cases for Reddit — and the site’s long slide into irrelevance began.
How can Reddit and similar sites (and even news sites) make money, then? Well if it’s all hinged on their community, it doesn’t hurt to have a strong one that’s filled with, as Clay Shirky has put it, love — members who continue coming back to have conversations, share content and create.
Scientists Crowdfund a Meth Lab, do an AmA
Instead of writing grant letters two Princeton and Columbia professors are using RocketHub, a crowd funding site for science, to raise money to find where exactly amphetamine and methamphetamine accumulate in the brain. They’ll do so by creating slightly radioactive stimulants that they can follow across a brain. All their findings, they promise, will be free and open to the public.
And from Reddit today, here’s one of the professors, Princeton’s Ethan Perlstein:
We are definitely going through a crowdfunding/crowdsourcing bubble, which means there’s a lot of experimentation and churn happening.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that in this climate, scientists who are better marketers will probably succeed more than scientists who aren’t good at communicating their science, or who are too busy to even try. Also, science that is more popular will have an edge in a bubble, and probably when things start to settle down.
FJP: If journalists and musicians can do it, why can’t cool scientists?
Where should freedom of speech begin and end when you are a web-based entity with a global audience? That’s the question raised by a couple of recent events, including the furor over a Reddit moderator’s creepy behavior, and now the news that Twitter has blocked an account for the first time at the request of a state government — in this case Germany, which asked the service to take action against a Twitter user posting neo-Nazi sentiments, something that is forbidden by the laws of that country. As the web and social tools become more mainstream, these kinds of battles over the limits that should apply to free speech are only going to become more frequent, but the solution to them remains elusive at best…
…Twitter has said that it will make its own judgments in such cases, as Google does — but what recourse do we have if they decide to do something we disagree with? More than anything, these kinds of cases reinforce how much influence private entities like Twitter and Google now have over what information we receive (or are able to distribute), and the responsibility that this power imposes on them.
Matthew Ingram, GigaOm. Twitter, Reddit and the battle over freedom of speech.
Important programming note as you think on this one: In the United States, at least and as Matthew points out, “free-speech protection is something that is only legally or constitutionally required of governments, not corporations.”
A great story is like a great melody: it announces its inevitable greatness and you recognize it the first time you hear it. Most stories aren’t that. They do not announce their obvious greatness. 60% are in the limbo region where they might GET great or they might flop, and the only way to figure it out is to start making the story. So you launch in, hoping for that winning combination of great moments, charm, funny, and X factor.
As a result, we go through tons of stories on our way to the few that end up on the air. It’s like harnessing luck as an industrial product. You want to get hit by lightning, so you have to wander around for a long time in the rain.
Social Media is the end of the chain of reporting and the beginning of the chain of gathering information. We have to use good old-fashioned journalism to break down what we see on social media and once we’re comfortable sharing that information we can put it back out.
Most of the time I am monitoring, gathering, reading, consuming information on social media, on our wire and in traditional formats. I’m talking to our newsroom, listening to what they’re hearing, putting it into understandable context, and then finally disseminating it both on social media and on Reuters.com
Curiosity’s Mars Descent in HD
Someone took all the pictures of the Mar’s descent and made a video of Curiosity’s descent to Mars.
Here’s his explanation, posted on Reddit:
For those wanting to know how I made this:
I manually added thousands of motion-tracking and adjustment points.
Here’s a screenshot of some of them
I had to go the laborious manual route because the frame-rate is too low causing the footage to jerk around too quickly for automated motion tracking to handle it.
It should definitely be noted that by its very nature interpolation creates inaccuracies. The original was 4fps, so converting to 30fps at the same speed means that you’re essentially inventing 87% of the footage.
On top of that I also had to use pan and scan techniques in order to convert it to the 1080p format but still track the interesting features.
The first few seconds were the hardest part. Accomplishing smooth movement in that section actually involved separating the heat shield from the background layer and rendering them as two independently moving layers.
I say all of this because people should understand that although I took great pains to make this accurate, you should still watch the original footage if you want a true accuracy.
(Plus, white-balancing images of a planet that we’ve never been to is quite a task :)
I used the rather meaningless phrase “ultra HD” to try and describe the fact that I actually rendered the video at enterprise-quality 1080p, 50,000 kbps (instead of the usual ~1000kbps). This meant it took the entire night to render and the filesize was hundreds of times bigger.
You probably won’t notice the difference unless you play the video at 1080p - but I think it was worth it.
A person who is bored of Reddit, is a person who is bored of life.
So wrote Benji Lanyado in an email yesterday. His latest project, Reddit Edit, pulls the three most popular links from six of Reddit’s most popular sections (or Subreddits, as they’re called).
The Subreddits — Politics, Worldnews, Technology, Science, Pics and Reddit’s front page — each boast a large portion of the site’s community and, according to Lanyado, showcase the users’ extraordinary ability to discover news.
And that discovery is all Reddit Edit is — the articles, pictures, etc. that users are most interested in. The community is fueled by its discussion, but the discussion is about the incredible pieces that Reddit Edit gives you.
What differentiates Reddit from similar sharing hubs like, say, Twitter, is that links only become popular if they receive more upvotes than the rest of the flood. It has nothing to do with the uploader. It’s a user determined front page, and according to Benji:
The upvoting and downvoting means that a kind of natural selection happens on Reddit - you get a sense of what a large body of web consumers are interested in, rather than niche stories being pushed by individuals with large followings. On Reddit, all users are equal.
FJP: For another one of our talks with Benji, see here.
Reddit Crashes. Blame Obama.
President Obama is/was starting an AMA (Ask Me Anything) appearance on Reddit and the service buckled under.
It’s back up though. You can follow the thread here.
Reddit, I am Barack Obama, President of the United States — AMA.
From Heroes to Humans: The Totally Regular People Who Landed a Robot on Mars
Yesterday afternoon, a group of the scientists and engineers orchestrating NASA’s Curiosity mission got together to do an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit. They got — and answered — questions about the mission itself, about the engineering that went into the Curiosity rover, about the lifestyle the mission requires of them. (For example: They reset their alarm clocks by 40 minutes every day to keep Mars time.)
The many exchanges of the AMA were, unsurprisingly, informative and illustrative and educational. But my favorite was, practically speaking, none of those things. It went like this:
Shorter version: “Hey, congrats on the robot you helped land on Mars, and everything! Also, you still have that algebra book I loaned you eight years ago. I don’t want it back, or anything, but just FYI.”
FJP: Oh, Reddit.
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