The Reddit Experiment

I frequent Reddit.com a lot, it's a good way to kill some time at work, and people post some really interesting stuff. Anyway, one of the things Reddit as a community as really good at is voting en masse on internet polls. They're huge fans of Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, so whenever some poll or donation request comes around they always jump on it, amassing thousands of votes. A few weeks ago someone found a public Greenpeace poll for what the organization should name an adopted whale, Mister Splashey Pants being the name with the most votes after Reddit intervention. In another instance, a bunch of social networking sites including Reddit came to the rescue of an old lady who had saved for an Alaskan cruise for years, but ended up getting screwed by the cruise line after missing her flight.

These instances of group cooperation really struck me. I found the Mister Splashey Pants incident pretty amusing, and voted for the name myself. Initially it warmed my heart knowing that there are people out there who not only feel empathy, but actually assist an old lady who had her dream ripped from her by an unfeeling corporation. The cruise line story, though, eventually made me really angry. Granted, it's great that somebody was helped somehow, but in the grand scope of things there are causes with much more worth than Almentia McKan's. I expressed my displeasure with this in the comments thread of the story, and it was (expectedly) met with disdain and a lot of down-modding.

The following night before going to bed, it occurred to me that I should be walking the proverbial walk instead of just criticizing the apathy people treat important causes with. With this in mind, I posted this thread to see if the community could be persuaded to focus its efforts on something more socially viable. I didn't expect it to get far, and aside for The Hunger Site, I didn't have any ideas of my own for where we could focus Reddit's efforts. Surprisingly enough, the story managed to move to the front page of Reddit relatively quickly. What I didn't expect, though, was the mass of negative responses I received. They ranged from, "'...we've proven our power with Mister Splashey Pants...' Sorry, don't mean to laugh, it's just a little hard to take you seriously after that statement." to, "Let's wave the magic reddit wand - and poof bush and cheney to be gone." And, of course, I got a plentiful number of reiterations of Rule 44 from /b/'s Rules of the Internet, the most striking series of posts, though, was this one-

"There are many rules for the internet - but only four worth remembering:
Rule #1: Do not talk about /b/.
Rule #2: DO NOT talk about /b/.
Rule #34: There is porn of it, no exceptions.
Rule #44: The internet is not your personal army.
Rule #44 answers the question in the original post."

To which I replied,

"This is a brainstorm, not a directive. You'd follow these arbitrary rules to the end even if a little cooperation did something productive?"

Which he responded with,

"Yes.
If people were meant to be productive, we would have never invented the internet."

While I had a mixed success with this experiment, I realize now that outright attempts to "unjustly influence" the actions of the fiercely independent among Reddit isn't going to work. Stage two will have to be a little more subtle. If I want to actually bring people together in an attempt to accomplish something, it will have to be both intrinsically valuable and be presented in a way that will bypass people's aversions to being used as the means to an end, no matter how good or important I deem the end to be.

Stay tuned for more updates,
Andy