Andrew Beaujon
July 20, 2012
11:00 am
In the early morning hours Friday, "Peener13" started a thread on Reddit called "
Someone came into our theater at the midnight release of Dark Knight Rises and began opening fire. Who here on Reddit can help me calm my nerves?" In the hours since, others have commented and added what they know, and Peener13 has edited her post to answer people's questions.
As I write this, there are more than 4,000 comments on her post. Peener13 is handling the attention with community-stoking grace, writing, "While this is not the way that I would have liked to make it to the front page, I'm happy that reddit has reacted in such a way to keep everyone, including myself, up to date." And, this being Reddit, she's offered some dark humor: "At least I won't be able to leak any spoilers."
Another Redditor called "themurderator" says he was at the showing, too, and he
uploaded pictures that, he says, show his wound and bloody T-shirt. "i’m actually reconsidering doing an AMA [Ask Me Anything, a Reddit feature]. i have a horrible feeling it would devolve into something i would not want to have anything to do with," he writes.
A user named
quepasacontigo has replied to the thread saying he lives across the street from accused shooter
James Holmes. He said a friend lives in the same building as Holmes and "hit me up as soon as the cops got there and started to evac everyone."
Quepasacontigo
posted photos of police preparing to enter an apartment building.
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Steve Myers
July 10, 2012
2:46 pm
The Daily Dot
In June,
Reddit temporarily banned several sites, including The Atlantic, for spamming. The Daily Dot reports that in some cases the punishment was quite temporary:
The Atlantic returned nine days ago; Discovery News only suffered the ban for three days; and BusinessWeek returned after two days—a slap on the wrist, at worst. ...
Not all of the sites kicked off Reddit in the Great Spam Purge have returned, however. ... Science sites PhysOrg and ScienceDaily remain barred from the site.
Reddit's general manager tells The Daily Dot's Kevin Morris that the site lifts such bans when publishers address the problem.
Morris wrote in April that Jared Keller, The Atlantic's associate editor and social media editor,
had been kicked off Reddit for spamming. Reddit doesn't prohibit users from sharing links to content that they have a vested interest in, Morris noted, but most users seem to think that shouldn't account for more than one in 10 links.
Keller relentlessly shared content from The Atlantic, frequently posting three or four articles in a single day, which, all told, added up to hundreds and probably thousands of links—so many, in fact, that clicking through 10 pages and 250 submissions worth of content takes you just three months deep into his submission history.
Correction: Although The Daily Dot reported that GlobalPost links are still banned from Reddit, a GlobalPost staffer tells Poynter that the punishment was lifted on Friday. Links have been posted since then.
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Jeff Sonderman
June 27, 2012
10:49 am
Slate |
Pbump.net
Farhad Manjoo writes:
How does this one site come up with so many simple ideas that people want to spread far and wide? What’s their secret?
The answer, in short, is that BuzzFeed’s staff finds stuff elsewhere on the Web, most often at Reddit. They polish and repackage what they find. And often—and, from what I can tell, deliberately—their posts are hard to trace back to the original source material.
... Once you understand how central Reddit is to BuzzFeed, it’s like spotting the wizard behind the curtain. Whenever you see a popular BuzzFeed post, search Reddit, and all will be revealed.
It's not the first time BuzzFeed has
taken heat for republishing other people's photos in lists like “
33 Animals Who Are Extremely Disappointed in You.” Manjoo said BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti "concedes that some of its ideas have appeared elsewhere online, but he argued that
there’s nothing wrong with that because few things on the Web are really original."
Grist writer Philip Bump, writing on his personal blog,
evaluates Manjoo's case against BuzzFeed:
Where Manjoo's post hits hardest, I think, is when it suggests that BuzzFeed steals ideas. ...
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Andrew Beaujon
June 14, 2012
8:01 am
The Daily Dot |
The New York Observer
Reddit
has banned several domains, including some from Atlantic Media, from being submitted to the popular social news site. Such bans, Reddit general manager Erik Martin
wrote on a discussion of the action, "are temporary," but they are a source of concern for publishers trying to benefit from the massive page views that can ensue when a link takes off there.
I can't find anything on Reddit saying exactly how the publishers allegedly gamed the site (though please note my understanding of Reddit comes almost exclusively from being thrilled when I notice one of Poynter's posts
is getting traffic from there). An April story on The Daily Dot said
The Atlantic's Jared Keller had been booted from Reddit, which informally bans submitting "a link to a site that you own or otherwise benefit from in some way," for allegedly spamming the site with thousands of links from Atlantic properties. Keller told The Daily Dot's Kevin Morris that he "tried to adhere to those standards."
New York Observer's Jessica Roy writes that several Reddit users are upset that no Conde Nast sites — that company, like Reddit, is owned by Advance Publications — have been banned for the same behavior. In a discussion of that point on the site, Reddit's Neil Williams
says they could be banned, too. "Hopefully they know better," Williams writes.
Related: "Loving the Alien: How Erik Martin, King Bee of Reddit’s Hive Mind, Harnessed the Buzz" (
New York Observer)
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Jeff Sonderman
Apr. 24, 2012
2:46 pm
Reddit
Washington Post blogger and columnist Ezra Klein held an AMA (short for "ask me anything") thread on Reddit today. His intended subject was a new
elections forecasting tool he developed. But of course, many of the more than 440 questions strayed.
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