Leo D.M.J. Aurini - February 21, 2013


Reddit： A Case Study of Democracy


Episode Stats

Length

10 minutes

Words per Minute

134.43535

Word Count

1,369

Sentence Count

96

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

Reddit has been around since before the dawn of the internet, but what is its purpose? How did it get to where it is today? And why does it suck so much? In this episode, we re going back to the origins of the site, 4chan, and how it came to be what it is now.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Everything wrong with American politics is everything that's wrong with Reddit.
00:00:07.000 I noticed this recently because, I'm proud to say, I've managed to raise the ire of just about every group there is out there.
00:00:16.000 Feminists and MRAs, conservatives and liberals, transhumanists and religious fanatics.
00:00:23.000 I've managed to piss all of them off, and my Reddit account is basically useless at this point.
00:00:29.000 But to get into why it's useless, to get into how this relates to politics and the media and what actually controls our society,
00:00:40.000 we need to go back to the beginning.
00:00:43.000 We need to go back to 4chan.
00:00:46.000 4chan is a beautiful thing.
00:00:50.000 It's easy to deride it as nothing but scatological humor, pissing into an ocean of piss, infinite trolls, and quite a bit of human cruelty.
00:01:01.000 But the anonymity of the thing creates this wonderfully anarchic environment where the posts on B that wind up reaching the front page,
00:01:13.000 that get hundreds of commentators on them and wind up being archived on the 4chan archive,
00:01:18.000 they get that way because they're popular, because there's something good going on in those posts.
00:01:26.000 And when it first began, there was a huge overlap between Reddit and 4chan.
00:01:32.000 4chan is the anonymous, random, chaotic, anarchic environment.
00:01:39.000 And over on Reddit, it was more about news aggregation, but it had the same tech-savvy, heavy internet-using sort of user base as 4chan.
00:01:51.000 It was just a little bit more formal and not anonymous.
00:01:58.000 See, on the surface, Reddit seems like a wonderfully democratic way of sharing news.
00:02:07.000 You go onto a subreddit that is your interest.
00:02:11.000 You go to subreddit Atheism, subreddit Politics, subreddit Paleocon, subreddit MRA,
00:02:18.000 and you post an interesting article up on there.
00:02:23.000 And if it's a good article and the other people like it, they upvote it.
00:02:27.000 Now, on the surface, there's the obvious problem.
00:02:32.000 If you're ever on the subreddit MRA, there's a major problem with feminist sock puppets coming on
00:02:38.000 and downvoting good posts or leaving stupid, distracting criticisms in the comments section on it.
00:02:47.000 And this is the sort of problem that most people are aware of and is easily addressed.
00:02:52.000 And there's this misperception that once you get that done, everything's smooth sailing further on.
00:03:01.000 When there's deeper, more systemic problems to the entire thing.
00:03:06.000 See, when it started out, Reddit was this heavy internet user community.
00:03:15.000 It was the sort of people that hung out on 4chan.
00:03:18.000 There's a huge amount of overlap.
00:03:21.000 On 4chan, they used to refer to Reddit as the other B.
00:03:26.000 But things shifted as time went on.
00:03:31.000 I like to think of them as the university elite.
00:03:38.000 Because the one that really made me realize that there was this different sort of person that went to Reddit
00:03:46.000 was an ex-girlfriend of mine.
00:03:48.000 A biologist, extremely politically correct, vaguely liberal-ish, even though she's probably conservative because we're in Alberta.
00:03:56.000 And she was going on there all the time to laugh at memes that originated on 4chan.
00:04:03.000 However, she was also the sort of person that's too prim and proper for 4chan.
00:04:08.000 That's going to be offended by all the scatology and the downright human ugliness that appears on 4chan.
00:04:16.000 That wants the prim and proper, the safe, the polite, the non-anonymous forum to go play around with.
00:04:26.000 And so as Reddit matured, you got more and more people like this that had these limits to their thinking.
00:04:33.000 That wanted to be part of proper society.
00:04:36.000 Think proper, behave proper, look at things on the internet that are proper.
00:04:41.000 As opposed to a truly open mind.
00:04:46.000 And then there's the anonymity thing.
00:04:50.000 The fact that Reddit is not anonymous.
00:04:53.000 It's not just that you are held accountable for everything that you write on Reddit.
00:05:00.000 Everything you upvote, everything you subscribe to.
00:05:03.000 You see, one of the other things you can do is subscribe to people on Reddit.
00:05:11.000 So in my case, I've got the situation where I have a whole bunch of people that hate me.
00:05:17.000 And if I post something, they're going to come and say something half true about me.
00:05:24.000 Or they're going to come downvote it for no reason. Et cetera, et cetera.
00:05:29.000 But even the popular people.
00:05:31.000 See, this is the thing.
00:05:32.000 To get a popular post on Reddit, you need a reputation.
00:05:36.000 You need a whole bunch of people subscribing to you already because they like your uploads.
00:05:41.000 Now, how do you become popular in a democratic environment?
00:05:46.000 You tow the party line.
00:05:48.000 It's going to vary a little bit from subreddit to subreddit.
00:05:54.000 But you have to be sure that you never say anything controversial.
00:05:57.000 That you don't rock the boat too much.
00:05:59.000 You have to find that right level of controversy to seem like you're on the edge without actually being on the edge.
00:06:07.000 Which is why you're going to hear ideas talked about on YouTube that you're never going to hear on AM radio.
00:06:14.000 AM radio still needs to play the game.
00:06:17.000 They still need to bid in.
00:06:18.000 They can't risk offending advertisers.
00:06:21.000 So what winds up happening is that Reddit, just like every other news aggregator that's ever been out there.
00:06:30.000 Dig, for instance, went down the same route about three years earlier.
00:06:36.000 What winds up happening is you have the popular party line.
00:06:41.000 Power becomes concentrated into a few nodes.
00:06:44.000 And the same message keeps repeating again and again and again.
00:06:50.000 To the point where, in the cases of Reddit, you know, it out-competed Dig.
00:06:54.000 Because, at first, it was a little bit more free market.
00:06:57.000 But now it's gone down the exact same route.
00:07:00.000 Now what does this have to do with politics?
00:07:04.000 Well, sometime back I was writing for Fast Forward Magazine.
00:07:12.000 And I had a brilliant piece I was going to post on the fat tax.
00:07:17.000 I had an interview with one of the elder ministers, whatever, in the city.
00:07:25.000 I forget the title.
00:07:26.000 There's 12 of them.
00:07:27.000 He had a district.
00:07:28.000 And I was talking to him about the whole fat tax, about obesity, etc.
00:07:34.000 And I made the point at the introduction of this article that, right now, before we're talking about legislation,
00:07:42.000 while it's still a conversation happening in the background of the public consciousness,
00:07:47.000 this is when we can change things.
00:07:50.000 This is when you can actually manipulate the future.
00:07:54.000 By the time you get to the point of New York where they're discussing it already, it's as good as done.
00:08:01.000 You're not going to change it at that point.
00:08:04.000 It's happened.
00:08:05.000 The committees behind the scenes have all discussed it at length.
00:08:08.000 Everybody that wants a piece of the pie has had their piece of the pie.
00:08:12.000 It's been sorted out and dealt with.
00:08:15.000 And there's just a few I's to dot, a few T's to cross.
00:08:19.000 You're not going to change it at that point.
00:08:22.000 Democratic systems inevitably result in power concentrating into a few nodes that you don't see.
00:08:30.000 And the newspapers, being one of these nodes, don't ever talk about these conversations that are happening at high levels
00:08:38.000 until the conversation has already been determined.
00:08:41.000 Of course, fast forward to not publish my article.
00:08:44.000 So when you go on Reddit, this apparently transparent system of voting articles up, of each Reddit,
00:08:58.000 each Reddit dedicated to its own sort of thing, is the illusion.
00:09:04.000 The illusion of choice, the illusion that your vote matters, when in actuality it's the guy that's corralled a number of subscribers,
00:09:12.000 that all get to upvote that one article that he's mentioning, that creates the true narrative within each subreddit.
00:09:21.000 And the same thing goes for politics, that when you have this popular mass appeal as the foundation,
00:09:31.000 eventually the people that can best play to public opinion corral all the power, and you wind up with a false choice.
00:09:43.000 One shout-out, though, I'd like to offer, and this is on Frost's recommendation.
00:09:49.000 He writes at Freedom 25, link down below.
00:09:52.000 The Red Pill Room over on Reddit.
00:09:55.000 He recommends it, and though I don't have much experience with it,
00:09:59.000 I certainly trust his judgement enough that I'll pass it along to you folks.
00:10:04.000 So, don't believe everything you're told.