Reddit Review

Every morning I take my news with a side of bacon. That's right, bacon. And there is only one place where I can satiate my appetite for up-to-the-minute reports on the G20 while I ogle in horror and lust at recipes for bacon filled waffles. Where is this nefarious place you ask? On the inter-webs of course, at Reddit.com specifically. Reddit launched in 2005 as a social news site where user submissions dictate the ever-changing content. The brainchild of UVA grads, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian quickly gained popularity for its broad range of shockingly current information; so much so that in 2006 Condé Nast acquired the domain for eight figures.

Still, the two young developers are the primary forces behind maintaining and improving the social news site. Its premise is simple. Reddit users (as in "I have read it") aggregate news stories from all over the net. They are presented in list form on the most simplistic but visually pleasing homepage I have ever seen. Imagine a Google search appearing with fifty percent less text and fifty percent more links. It's a headline skimmer's paradise; and the Reddit application for the iPhone is my new under-the-table secret weapon for battling sluggish dinner party conversation.

       But what many early skeptics have wondered about Reddit and its rival Digg is: how can all of this news be "important?" It's a question that differentiates these competing sites and puts Reddit ahead of the curve.

      In a 2006 interview with Philoneist.com, co-founder Alexis Ohanian acknowledged that everyone values information differently. At Digg, top contributors have a monopoly on front page real estate. Therefore, a relative few "Diggers" dictate what is important by making it most accessible. But Ohanian believes that it is "a personal question. It's why [Reddit] is building a system that personalizes news to each user. When users are voting based on what genuinely interests them, because they are training a filter, [they can] expect a higher degree of honesty, which ultimately benefits the community with more accurate scores."

      Oharian's mission for the website may seem simple enough, but what draws the internet community to Reddit and away Digg is an ingenious model. When a nonmember navigates to Reddit.com they are presented with the most popular stories in several categories including politics, science, funny, technology, pics etc. The top ranked stories in these default categories then appear on the home page. But what makes every user's Reddit page different from the next is their ability to customize the categories in which they wish to read news. In my case that would include bacon as well as world news.

            By filtering news into subpages, Reddit can reach far beyond its median audience. According to Condé Nast, the 3.3 million Reddit users per month are a mean age of 40.3, have an average household income of $100,311, and are 65% are male. The last statistic is markedly more obvious than the others. There are days when Reddit seems overrun by stereotypical web geeks. On those days the comment sections turn into a contest over who can beat a horse deadest. And somehow Star Wars always comes up regardless of the initial content.

            As far as the default content itself, it can be generally described as politically centrist and extremely Darwinian; at times atheistic and nearly always inclusive of LOLCats. Taking this into account does diminish Reddit's general appeal; however it has such a strong and growing constituency who take their jobs as critics very seriously.

            On April 23, 2008, Helen Thomas, long-time member of the White House Press Corps challenged Secretary Dana Perino on then President Bush's use of torture. The news appeared immediately on Reddit and was up-voted to the top of the homepage. The comments revealed a community that was overwhelmed with gratitude for Ms. Thomas' hard hitting and expository questioning. So much so that one reader started a collection fund in order to send Ms. Thomas flowers. Just one week later Helen Thomas' office was filled with $3,700 worth of roses, signed Reddit.com.

The unprecedented nature of this gesture speaks to the love that Redditors have for Ms. Thomas. But what it really embodies is the dedication they have to this the social news site. It is precisely what Oharian refers to when describing the value of Reddit's content. Each user aims to supply the best information that they can uncover in hundreds of genre. This unique form of cooperation is what makes the Reddit experiment one of the strongest representations of human collective action striving toward a better, more informed society.