Good article.
When it comes to the basic human decency of its userbase, Reddit lags FAR behind the other sites. All one has to do to see that is to look at the subreddits (the sections of Reddit). They have subreddits for "jailbait" pornography, lady bashing, Christian bashing, and it goes downhill from there. The site is chock full of every imaginable type of pornography, racism, misogyny, and just plain hatred.
The "Astonishing Altruism" article is propaganda and is factually wrong on several points. I pointed out the many places where it is wrong and they deleted my comment.
When Thanksgiving rolls around, we’re thinking you won’t be sitting back reminiscing that time you were called a @#$% on Digg — repeatedly, and insult-to-injury down-voted — for posting a link to kittens jumping into boxes. Or the time Slashdot users called a female tech writer “ugly” when someone posted her article about tech and social justice.
You’ll recline in front of the fireplace with your loved ones, full of feast and wine, thinking Thank you, groupthink Internet. Today I’m thankful for the great gifts you bestow of anonymous verbal abuse from community-driven link sharing sites.
Not so much, eh?
Us too. But when we saw what the users on Reddit have been up to lately, we wondered if it was backwards day on the Internet.
Social link sharing website Reddit isn’t like the other girls. Marketing blog Volter Creative did a roundup of the things Reddit has made news with over the past few years, and promptly decided that if Digg is going to rise out of its coffin yet again, then Reddit might be Buffy.
In a huge post titled Reddit’s Astonishing Altruism, we find out that when Condé Nast wanted to buy their very own version of MetaFilter or Slashdot, they sort of won the link sharing community lottery. Reddit’s voracious, sprawling community is just as full of the trolls and mob mentality as the other guys but something very different is at work here: Reddit mobilizes its forces for some pretty astonishing acts of giving.
I Can Haz Wheelchair?
The most famous event Reddit found itself in recently was being the epicenter and groundswell to kickstart The Daily Show and Colbert Report’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. In case you missed it, two days after Glenn Beck’s rally a Reddit member (called “Redditors”) voiced hope for a response rally by Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. Fellow Redditors carried the torch until it became a bonfire to the tune of Reddit community members donating $500,000 in support of the rally to donorschoose.org.
The non-celebrity actions of Reddit are what might just turn your blackened, Internet-frozen heart into warm fluffy kittens and snuggly puppies. This October, in response to a young girl with Huntington’s Disease being bullied and taunted online about dying, Redditors raised $17K for a shopping spree for the girl; she shopped all she possibly could and then gave the rest to Mott’s Children’s Hospital for new toys.
In the first week of September a random invitation to a man’s 90th birthday party was posted on 4Chan and then shared on Reddit, and the next day began a flood of cards, gifts flowers and presents for the veteran: five UPS trucks were needed for deliveries from internet strangers on the day of William Lashua’s very happy 90th birthday party.
Reddit community members also raised money for Redditor “wilwaldon” mother’s funeral costs; they’ve bought a wheelchair for a disabled member and erupted in gifts for a member who had cancer.
It’s a nerd’s world: The tech skills of Redditors have put a decidedly geek-flavored spin on the tales of giving, thanks and kindness from a type of forum more associated with sexism than a hive-mind do-gooder.
In 2009, Redditors used their search-fu to help a community member reunite with his birth mother. Expert Photoshop skills saved the last photo of a member’s deceased mother; the same year members put their skills to work in clarifying an image from a surveillance camera to aid in a murder investigation.
Redditors are also known for talking members out of suicidal thoughts, and have an area on the site called “SuicideWatch”. When a Redditor called “Dpressed” posted that she couldn’t shake her urge to die, forum conversation led to her revealing specific clues which led to a fellow Redditor matching Dpressed’s symptoms with his wife’s: the culprit was a form of birth control both women had been using. Dpressed discovered that this was the problem, and expressed her gratitude in the post Thank you, reddit, you have saved my life.
