Adventures in Reddit

A little over a year ago, I was introduced to the news aggregator site Reddit, and it has slowly but surely become the website that has taken over most of my browsing time on the Internet. Oh, it looks harmless enough at first, with its no-frills design and alien logos. All the content is user-submitted or linked to with the appropriate crediting, each item displayed in an order determined by "upvotes" and "downvotes" from Redditors. The high prevalence of cute animal pictures and image memes mixed in with the hard news make it seem like they would get old quickly. Then you discover the comments, where the users share insights and can have incredibly involved conversations, also displayed according to "upvotes" and "downvotes," so that the most interesting and relevant comments rise to the top. Click on a funny picture of a swan, and the comments might provide a dozen more funny swan pictures and stories, bird experts explaining the behavior being pictured, and a raging debate over local ordinances related to waterfowl.

It's the users that make Reddit such a fascinating timesink. Some of the best features, like the "AskReddit" posts where people can solicit advice or share stories, and the "AMA," short for "Ask me Anything" posts where users bombard scheduled celebrities and other mortals of distinction in no-holds-barred Q&As, are totally driven by user participation. I have literally spent hours on single "AskReddit" posts, reading dozens of personal stories shared in response to innocuous questions like, "What's the worst date you ever had?" and "What's the best practical joke you ever pulled off?" There are so many Redditors from all over the world, there's a high chance that somebody will have a new and interesting take on even the moldiest old subject, and those are the responses that tend to be upvoted to the top. Because everyone's using a pseudonym and there's no censoring except by other users, the stories are often refreshingly raw and unfiltered.

Occasionally all this collective Reddit power can be directed to altruistic purposes like raising money and political activism - see the anti-PIPA/SOPA campaigns. When major catastrophes happen, like the Aurora shootings, local Redditors will often be able to provide information and updates faster than traditional news sources - which can be viewed as both a positive or a negative. The system isn't perfect, and there have been plenty of hoaxes and fraudsters in the mix, but it's also encouraging how many of them get caught. The Reddit system has proved incredibly versatile and adaptable to a variety of different situations. In addition to the main Reddit site, there are thousands of "subreddits" devoted to specific topics like technology, cute animal pictures, the NBC sitcom "Community," and UC Berkely students. And of course, you have the attention-getters like the atheist, marijuana-enthusiast, and NC-17 rated subreddits. You can also customize your Reddit account to only view content from particular subreddits, so Redditors' experiences with the site can be radically different.

Alas, this is where Reddit stumbles a bit for a movie nut like me. The subreddit populations are self-selected, and though there is a sizable and active Movie subreddit, the participants are largely teenage and twenty-something males who really, really love Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, and are always asking for movie recommendations, trying to figure out what movie the cool trailer they saw on Youtube was for, and waxing nostalgic about the 90s. This is fine, but it really limits the kind of conversations you can have. The more erudite and crusty movie fans tend to hang out in the TrueFilm subreddit, which is very slowly building up a pretty good community, but it's going to take time before it can match up to pace of the traditional movie forums that I like to frequent. I still hang out in both subreddits an awful lot though, because they both have lots of potential, and occasionally they'll come through for me. I've also had some luck with subreddits for individual TV shows.

My biggest problem with Reddit right now is really just time management. Lately I spend way too much time on the site, to the point where I'm checking it multiple times a day for new content. I comment a fair amount too, and can get a little too invested in which contributions are getting the most responses and upvotes. I got into an argument with someone yesterday about movie release date scheduling, of all things. What can I say? What makes Reddit work is the user participation, so if you're not participating, you're not getting the full experience of being a Redditor.

And finally, FYI, the really cool trailer you saw was probably for "The Raid: Redemption," "God Bless America," or "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil." They are all out on DVD now.
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