Mother Jones | Poynter
Aside from Reddit users' attempts to help solve the Boston bombings case, online communities have had some success in cracking cases, Tim Murphy writes. Redditors have helped with some previous investigations, Murphy writes, and "the best example of what Reddit could be -- if it became a bit less like Reddit, that is -- is a site called websleuths.com."

The most high-profile example of Websleuth's utility was the 2009 murder of Abraham Shakespeare, a Florida laborer who won $32 million in the lottery. Police speculated that Shakespeare's financial advisor, Dee Dee Moore, might have had information about her disappearance. Websleuths began digging, prompting Moore to register for the site under an anonymous name to defend her actions. "She came back to me in an email and said I don't know who is posting it, that wasn't me, and I said 'That's funny the IP address in this email matches the number of your computer,'" recalls Tricia Griffith, who has co-owned the site since 2004. "I had a detective call me up and say this is just great." Moore was eventually convicted.

Another example: Jalopnik readers last April identified the part of a car left behind by suspects in a murder investigation, leading Waynesboro, Va., police to an arrest. (more...)

The South by Southwest panel, “It’s Reddit’s World; We Just Live in It,” set out to answer a tough question: "How is Reddit's power altering Web culture -- and should we celebrate it, or fear it?”

The either/or setup of the question was reflective of the divide between audience members and the panelists -- Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, Skepchick's Rebecca Watson, and Gawker's Adrain Chen, who wrote the controversial piece about Reddit troll Michael Brutsch. The panelists seemed more fearful of Reddit than audience members were, and at times they classified Reddit users as bigoted, racist and “hyperskeptical.”

There is an “overwhelming amount of sexism and racism and any other -ism you can name” on the site, Watson told the crowd.

The panelists did highlight some positive aspects of the Reddit community, such as Redditors' efforts to raise money for a bullied bus monitor. But their overall attitude was negative.

Participants told them as much on Twitter and during a Q&A session; they criticized the panelists for not taking a more balanced approach and for implying that Reddit is the only place online where racism and sexism live. The conversation was a reminder that there are those who embrace social media sites and those who view them with skepticism.

Skepticism can be healthy, unless it limits your ability to see a social network’s potential or causes you to generalize: "Reddit is a site for bigots and racists"; "Pinterest is for girly girls, not men"; "Twitter is a site where people announce what they had for lunch." These generalizations make it too easy to pigeonhole and dismiss social media sites, and they can ultimately stifle innovation.

When I interviewed The New York Times' C.J. Chivers for a story about Pinterest last year, he said: "Social media is a tool, like many others in our trade -- it can be as good and as useful as we force it to be.”

Here's a look at how the "Reddit Roast" played out: (more...)

Reddit
Superstar blogger Nate Silver took questions on Reddit Tuesday. One user asked him whether he found sports or politics "more frustrating to analyze." Politics, Silver replied: "Between the pundits and the partisans, you're dealing with a lot of very delusional people."

Another Redditor asked him how much he enjoyed "getting the ire of pundits."

"At some point in the last few weeks of the election, I guess I decided to lean into the upside outcome a little bit in terms of pushing back at the pundits in my public appearances -- as opposed to emphasizing the uncertainty in the model, as I had for most of the year," Silver replied. (more...)

• Gawker's Adrian Chen revealed one of Reddit's biggest "trolls" is Michael Brutsch, a 49-year-old computer programmer who lives in Texas. Brutsch posted under the name "Violentacrez" and cultivated a bizarre symbiotic relationship with Reddit's management, Chen wrote. At the same time he moderated subsections of the giant Internet community with names like "Jewmerica" and "Misogyny," he "came to an uneasy truce" with site administrators:

For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across.

• Moderators of various "subreddits," including the site's popular politics page, banned all Gawker media links before Chen's article was published to protest Brutsch's imminent unmasking. Some pointed out the irony of Redditors objecting to the personal information of a man who moderated subsections dedicated to surreptitiously taken photos of women; Reddit GM Erik Martin told Betabeat: “Moderators are free to moderate their subreddits as they see fit ... They can ban all usernames that start with the letter g if they want.” (more...)

New Statesman | Betabeat | The Awl
Moderators on Reddit's highly trafficked politics site r/politics have banned links from Gawker Media properties. Gawker journalist Adrian Chen is reportedly planning to expose the identity of a Reddit moderator named violentacrez who organized Reddit pages "dedicated to, respectively, sexualised pictures of under-18s and sexualised pictures of women – frequently also under-age – taken in public without their knowledge or consent," Alex Hern writes.

"Reddit's attitude to free speech is a complex one," Hern writes: (more...)

Reddit
Reason.com links are not currently welcome at Reddit.

Reached by telephone, Reddit General Manager Erik Martin confirms the ban; he said "most of" the site's previously reported bans, which snagged domains like Atlantic.com and Businessweek.com, had been lifted. "Those bans were for a week or two at most," Martin said, noting that Reddit had been in touch with Reason and that "we still have more investigating to do."

Reddit bans sites "after a long period of coordinated spam activity from that domain, and often after admins contact the domain in question," Reddit user MrDubious, who seems to know a lot about the site's anti-spam activities, writes. "For a while, Reason.com spam reports were showing up daily."

On the phone, Reason.com Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie said Reddit is consistently one of Reason's "top 3 or 4 traffic referrers." Reddit, he said, "has been the site that puts stuff through the roof. When a piece goes big on Reddit it goes gigantic on Reason." (more...)

Salon | Salon | TechPresident | Marshall Kirkpatrick
Apparently, the future of news is not conferences about the future of news. The future of news is debates about Reddit.

The flashpoint for this round was Michael Barthel's take on Mathew Ingram's piece about how people on Reddit covered the Colorado theater shootings. Citizen journalism such as what Redditors practiced, Barthel writes, is remarkably similar to the traditional type:

A large number of people are all working on a breaking story at the same time, seeing what information others have as it comes out (monitoring the Twitter feeds of other news orgs is like reading through a Reddit thread), and using their own resources to find out new information, eventually coming collectively to some sort of coherent picture.

The problem is those people are unpaid, so they'll likely pounce only on stories of obvious interest.

For all of their problems, one of the great values of journalistic organizations is that they have people on salary whose job it is to be aware of what’s going on in a particular area of society, every day, all the time. All the little, seemingly unimportant stuff gets covered that way, and when a big story breaks there’s someone with the expertise to put it in context. With citizen journalism, the only things that get covered are the ones with a critical mass of posters large enough to properly crowdsource the story on an amateur basis.

New York University prof Jay Rosen responds, saying Barthel's piece is a trend story in search of a trend:

The Matt Ingram article Salon uses here to suggest that there is a wave of hype actually makes a very modest claim. It says that citizens journalists “may not replace the traditional journalism we’re used to, but they are certainly going to help.” That’s hype? That’s excess enthusiasm?

(more...)