Reddit’s Astonishing Altruism

http://voltier.com/2010/11/12/reddits-astonishin-altruism/

by kqr2 • 16 years ago

372 127 16 years ago

sage_joch• 16 years ago

The quote that comes to mind when I think of the reddit community: "Look, the people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us."

vaksel2• 16 years ago

i attribute that description to 4chan...reddit is kinda meh by comparison

mitjak• 16 years ago

By comparison of what? Reddit is not composed of typical people mentioned above? Or do all regular folk gather round to share Impact captioned cartoons of homosexual sheep riding bicycles through fields of scrotums?

jewbacca5• 16 years ago

4chan is Chaotic Neutral.

Reddit is Neutral Good.

archon8102• 16 years ago

That sounds like 4chan as well.

techbio• 16 years ago

Their enforcement of the Streisand Effect is quite impressive.

panacea• 16 years ago

reddit is made of people.

zeraholladay2• 16 years ago

Yeah, but you could say the same thing about the Nazi party and the civil rights movement in the United States. That statement is vacuous since I seriously doubt anyone reading this thought Reddit might be made of non-people. What's your point?

EDIT: While I agree with your sentiment and my comment could be interpreted has harsh depending on the tone of voice, I've said this kind of thing before (x is made of people) and always wished I had clarified it more. So please think of it as more of an invitation rather than a challenge.

tav• 16 years ago

Am I the only person who found Reddit generally quite unpleasant?

It really is heart-warming to hear of all the good that those on Reddit have done. But I can't help feel that it's the exact same mob mentality which made me want to leave Reddit in the first place — discussions got extremely polarised very quickly and there seemed to be very little room for reasoned dialogue.

The article makes it sound like a good thing that "comments are generally downvoted by dozens or even hundreds of people with remarkable speed, pushing their noxious posts down into obscurity within minutes". But, since everyone can downvote — hell, I have even see non-controversial statements get downvoted heavily — the quality of dialogue often ends up being at the level of the lowest common denominator.

Lewisham2• 16 years ago

Reddit is not a place to have dialogue. Community-moderated areas just aren't very good at it. Even HN has been accused from suffering groupthink. If you want dialogue, forums, mailing lists or better yet, the real world (if you can find the community you need to discuss things with), is a better place to have it.

heyitsnick• 16 years ago

> If you want dialogue, forums, mailing lists or better yet, the real world (if you can find the community you need to discuss things with), is a better place to have it.

Why?

wvenable2• 16 years ago

Reddit is a very good place to have a discussion with a small group of people -- thanks to the orangered envelope you get whenever someone replies to one of your posts. HN, by comparison, discussions last only as long as the link remains on the homepage. On reddit, I've had conversations go on for weeks.

dhughes• 16 years ago

Or use Google Chrome/Chromium and get the Chattit extension so you can bicker in real-time!

But seriously most people are members of Reddit, Digg (well..), HN etc. it's not like each website only has the same guys and girls (yes girls!) whether people admit it or not some if not most people read many types of social news websites.

axod2• 16 years ago

The mob rule is extremely distasteful to watch IMHO, and it's certainly a very specific community now - liberal, pro-drugs, anti-consumerism etc etc. There's a lot of knee-jerk reactions and short-termism - outraged one day, forgotten the next.

They can get their users to 'do good' in the world, but can they make any money yet?

anon_d• 16 years ago

Stop reading r/politics!

jewbacca5• 16 years ago

Perhaps compared to HN. But I would characterize Reddit (as characterized by what's voted up into default visibility) as fairly open-minded, even compulsively contrarian. While a large proportion of the up/down-voting is from petty agreement, there is still a strong enough core of "productive discussion" voting to overcome it. Especially with knee-jerk outrage stories, there's as much skepticism as I've seen in any online community (and more apparent reservation in judgment than I see in many fairly reasonable people I know personally). There's a lot of good research that gets done (when possible), and it's usually voted above the froth very quickly. Sensationalism will almost always get called out hard.

I really can't conceive of any way a forum (online or afk) with sufficient mass (with the accompanying noise, groupthink and trolling that any community of people will pick up) to accomplish the things that Reddit has/may yet could turn out any more reasonable.

ronnoch3• 16 years ago

> But I would characterize Reddit (as characterized by what's voted up into default visibility) as fairly open-minded, even compulsively contrarian.

Have you been there recently? They're "contrarian" in the sense that they disagree with the non-Reddit mainstream, but they hardly respect contrarianism to their own views. I definitely would not call them "open-minded." (At least, not in the main subreddits. There are smaller, more intellectual communities within Reddit for which this is not as true.)

afshin• 16 years ago

I think it depends on the specific discussion. The front-page articles for the bigger subreddits are just too crowded to have any sort of nuance a lot of the time. But if you're interested in specific topics and are subscribed to smaller subreddits, you can have really good back-and-forth with no pitchfork-waving.

smhinsey• 16 years ago

I feel the same way about some of the bigger subreddits, but if you spend some time to find the good ones, the site improves dramatically.

However, one unfortunate thing is that the programming subreddit isn't (in my opinion) part of the signal. It's just as full of intolerable sniping and general assume-the-worst behavior as anywhere else on the web.

jamii• 16 years ago

The coding subreddit is somewhat better.

rdtsc• 16 years ago

> But I can't help feel that it's the exact same mob mentality which made me want to leave Reddit in the first place.

To put in the cliché Freudian speak -- Reddit is the Id and HN is Superego.

Reddit is the place to call people stupid, post silly pictures of cats, but also a place to get together and donate for a cause, talk someone out of a suicide, or just spread around stupid memes for fun. A well placed witty one-liners will get you hundreds of upvotes. Anything too intellectual will likely get a TL;DR type reaction.

HN is the site that discusses issues in depth, rational, evidence backed arguments are expected, civility and maturity is expected as well. A stupid one liner will most likely be frowned upon.

But I think we need both. I am a member of both sites and both provide for a what I consider a healthy outlet for my online presence.

jamesteow• 16 years ago

"Anything too intellectual will likely get a TL;DR type reaction."

I mostly agree with your post except for this. I actually find that Redditor's are extremely good about offering a counterpoint to a sensational title. Oftentimes, someone in the field related to the article will post something intellectual debunking the story (especially in the case of something to do with science or medicine) which will offer far more additional material than the source itself.

crocowhile• 16 years ago

I think you are all being very unfair. I find the same proportions of insightful comments on reddit and HN but I find HN has a form of snobism that I profoundly dislike. Not in all users, but it's obviously there and sucks.

If you avoid the stupidest subreddits (/pics, /funny, etc) it's actually amazing what high level of discussion you can meet. (while having a good laugh too, btw).

pinchyfingers• 16 years ago

The key to Reddit is to unsubscribe from every major subreddit, and just stick with the one's that fulfill your niche interests. If you do that, there is reasonable dialog to be had.

ggchappell• 16 years ago

> Am I the only person who found Reddit generally quite unpleasant?

Not at all. I think Reddit is a classic example of the "evaporative cooling effect" in groups. It's now dominated by a very restricted set of opinions. It looks very open and welcoming (initially, at least), if you share those opinions, but it's obviously ridiculously narrow-minded, if you don't.

colah2• 16 years ago

I've actually switched from reading HN to mostly reading Reddit.

The level of discourse increases quite a bit in subreddits, and you can usually find good discussions on even obscure interests. On the other hand, its pretty rare for the level of discourse to get to the level of HN. But level of discourse isn't the only quality of Reddit.

I think the main reason for me switching to mostly reading Reddit was because I found it very comforting to read r/atheism (my family is very Christian, mostly fundamentalist and I was a closeted Atheist). I suspect that emotional support is what a lot of people go to reddit for.

nimms• 16 years ago

For me, the main unpleasantness of reddit lies in the amount of pun threads that show up in the comments on any story. It may have been funny at first, but it just makes it harder and harder to find the actual interesting comments.

however, judging by the number of upvotes they all receive, there's probably hundreds of thousands of people out there who disagree with me, but seriously, a lot of comments on there are like i can haz cheezburger without the cutesy grammer.

mkr-hn3• 16 years ago

I rarely see those. If you see them a lot, you can tinker with your thresholds so most of them will be hidden.

e40• 16 years ago

What I find really annoying about reddit is that inane and snarky comments are almost always at the top. You sometimes have to scroll very far to see a serious comment. I see this as a symptom of the fact the average reddit user is quite young.

However, I'll tell you a secret: the subreddit called TrueReddit does not suffer from this. It's really pleasant.

niels_olson• 16 years ago

One anecdote that didn't make the article: my wife had a patient with multiple sclerosis and she thought he could get some real theraputic value from a Wii. We pitched it on Reddit and Facebook, and between the two, came up with over $200.

scorpion032• 16 years ago

Just everyday normal people living their lives and going out of their way to help each other and support greater causes.

To me, this increases trust in humanity!

zackattack• 16 years ago

Jesus christ, these stories make me cry. I don't know if this is something I need to explore deeper, or if I'm simply torturing myself by reading them.

archon8102• 16 years ago

Twinkles were abundant today near my facial area.

jimbokun• 16 years ago

An oft cited reason for founding a company is to make the world better in some way. These 25 stories demonstrate that Reddit has undeniably accomplished that.

josephd• 16 years ago

Are you all forgeting the good deeds reported about in the article? Does that count for anything from an online community?

revoltingx2• 16 years ago

Churches are the biggest donators in the world. Does that count for anything for them?

thomasz• 16 years ago

Is that true?

phlux4• 16 years ago

As a redditor of going on nearly 5 years, this story brought me to tears (followed each of these events and participated in some) - and is personally my favorite YC spawn.

skbohra1232• 16 years ago

Am I the only one here who doesn't know what's 4chan ?

ronnoch3• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan

ComputerGuru• 16 years ago

Probably not, but (and not to be snarky or anything... well, maybe just a little), you do know what Google and Wikipedia are.... right?

I never understand the point of posts that ask knowledge that can be easily obtained (in both concise and verbose forms; with all the perspective and facts you could want) by just clicking on one of the top 5 results in Google.

skbohra1232• 16 years ago

Probably the intent of such posts is to find out if I am outdated or what? If more people haven't heard about something discussed here I would be convinced that this isn't something to worry about.

satori99• 16 years ago

reddit is basically an IRC server for the web, with voting.

The cleverst thing they have done is also entirely simple. By making all thread replies to your posts appear in your inbox as personal messages, and highlighting the orange icon, it successfully encourages users to make reasonably deep replies to those that bite.

This seems to generate interesting thread content very quickly.

My only gripe is the lack of resolution in the voting system (ala /.). Meme overload is a real problem when browsing reddit.

redthrowaway2• 16 years ago

Meme overload is a significant problem on any large internet community that's web-centric in its outlook. From SA to 4chan to reddit, any community that thinks of itself as "the Internet" will employ memes as a means of self-confirmation.

state_machine2• 16 years ago

"upboat"

QED.

heed• 16 years ago

Arguably none of the altruistic acts 'reddit' has performed are representative of the entire reddit population.

marknutter4• 16 years ago

I actually find reddit to be somewhat nauseating. Call me cynical, but I can't help but think the Reddit community performs every kind act with an air of smug, self-centerdness you often find in creepy church youth groups or after school specials. I started visiting reddit because digg's links started sucking, and now I visit HN primarily because reddit is no longer about good links either. It's a maassive geek circle jerk where people share semi amusing images, write self-affirming posts, and run every meme known to man into the ground. Reddit's new slogan about sums it up: "The Voice of the Internet." That's a lofty claim. Anyways, the same thing is bound to happen to HN at some point. The problem with social news sites is that they all get worse as the user base grows.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for helping people. But reddit was a link aggregator at one point, and it has been disappointing to see that side of it melt away over the years.

drivebyacct23• 16 years ago

I will call you cynical. How can you sit there and say that? You have no examples of them doing this for self-serving purposes and quite frankly, the volume and repetition of their generosity is so great that it is bewildering to think that they are doing it for self serving purposes. And who gives a shit if I get off on helping people? Isn't it a good thing that I feel good about helping people? Isn't that in line with a sense of humanity?

edit: Additionally, remove /r/pics, /r/funny, /r/atheism and add the more obscure tech subreddits. There is plenty of tech content that comes through in /r/programming and /r/javascript that shows up before it shows up here. It is a link aggregator. Please take the 5 minutes, make an account and setup your subreddits correctly. I think you could be very pleasantly surprised.

marknutter4• 16 years ago

I said I have no problem with people helping others - I'm not a sociopath. It's the whole "look, everyone, at how awesome we are" circle jerk that I find nauseating. Besides, I think reddit has performed an equal number of acts of vengeance as they have acts of altruism and have nailed the wrong person in more than one instance - perhaps that's worthy of a blog post. At least 4chan admits what it is.

Again, my issue isn't that reddit is an active community, it's that it has turned from a link sharing site to a larger, more work friendly version of 4chan with an incredibly inflated sense of self-righteousness.

And to be sure, I'm no reddit noob, I've had an account for 3 years and spent a lot of time cultivating my subreddits. It is a matter of opinion, I realize, but overall it has become a pretty poor source of good web content these days, for me anyhow.

mkr-hn3• 16 years ago

I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding of Reddit on HN. If you stick with defaults, you're missing the best features of Reddit.

Customize your frontpage and set your thresholds, and Reddit is whatever you want it to be.

Marticus• 16 years ago

What I don't understand is how exactly it is as you claim it is. My Reddits consist of programming, robotics, science, math, etc.t, and get nothing but positive, helpful feedback and meaningful discourse that DOESN'T (key word here) infuriate me. Not sure how it's a "circle jerk" at that point when I can ask questions and have them gasp answered in a timely manner.

Just because it has a "politics" Reddit doesn't mean the entire site sucks.

I come to HN for the simple reason that it's more about startups and programming than most anything else, and overall I am just as happy with its content. It's considerably more granular, and sometimes that's precisely what I want.

I read both sites and have for quite some time now (although mostly lurking). I get immensely good return on my time invested in both.

marknutter4• 16 years ago

Well it is true I'm criticizing reddit as it is without any customization, but I don't think that makes my criticisms any less valid. r/politics, r/atheism, r/pics, r/askreddit, etc. are, like it or not, major parts of the site and generate the majority of the traffic (oh, r/barelylegal too). The subreddits I've subscribed to in the past, like r/ruby and r/web_design have been so sparsely active they're next to worthless. If you say to me, "sure, the site sucks if you focus on that 90% of it, but it can be great if you meticulously dig for the 10% that's worth something" I think you've proven my point for me.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

creepy church youth groups or after school specials

Yes, yes! Exactly!

I used to read programming reddit, and made a lot of comments there. Then I started to notice a pattern -- people were so happy that they wrote a blog post that it was suddenly forbidden to comment on it. One post I remember reading was something like, "hey guys, I made a PHP app! it's open source so please comment". The app was doing something like submitting a form field like "?shell_command=someapp%20--args". I said it was maybe not good practice to allow the user to supply an arbitrary UNIX command. The reply was, "well, my app sets that, and nobod is going to change it". I told him anyone could change the URL and run whatever they want. This got downmodded and I was told I was being an "idiot jerk".

Then I didn't read reddit anymore. Obviously I was raining on some sort of special parade that I was not even invited to.

Anyway, there's something off about the Reddit community. I think your post sums it up quite well.

pbiggar• 16 years ago

Sadly, the quality of programming.reddit went way way down, but there are lots of reddit communities that didn't. For example, people founded the coding reddit because programming became so bad.

blhack• 16 years ago

It still is a link aggregator and, aside from problems with the spam filter, it's a very good one.

People get confused about what reddit is; it isn't like digg or HN in that it is one link aggregator, it's a web service that allows you you to group similar webpages together.

It just so happens that the most popular groupings happen to be the least interesting to outliers, which should be obvious...this is why they're outliers.

check out: <http://www.reddit.com/r/truereddit>; <http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience>; <http://reddit.com/r/longreads>;

Think about reddit like usenet, the grouping syntax is just different.

reddit.com/r/$group

instead of

$group.$subgroup.$subgroup.$subgroup

BornInTheUSSR• 16 years ago

Hmm, this spontaneity might just be channeled into a start up idea. Imagine a site predicated on a community of users pitching in a buck a month or more to fund some life-changing event for a random or deserving person.

state_machine2• 16 years ago

But this kind of thing exists: charities and fundraisers are nothing new.

The fact that it is their reddit taking action, and not some church group or NGO, is probably what motivates at least some of the participants.

revoltingx2• 16 years ago

Reddit and its community blows balls. There are churches out there who contribute in much bigger ways and get less publicity.

What a bunch of self serving douchebags. I'm sure they contribute online, but what will they do when someone in need approaches them in the street?

This kind of behavior is disgusting.

limedaring2• 16 years ago

Seriously? You hear of a group of people who do good things, and your response is, "Well, they don't do as well as this other group that does good things!"

They did some really great things, and your response is "disgusting". Sad.

incogneato2• 16 years ago

I would agree with you if it wasn't for the fact that Reddit constantly bashes that "other group" and never gives them credit when it's due.

aberkowitz3• 16 years ago

People tend to be fascinated when a system does things it is not created to do.

Reddit's primary purpose is to share and comment on links whereas churches are founded to spread goodwill in a community.

TeHCrAzY2• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure churches are not founded to spread goodwill in a community.

scythe• 16 years ago

It's altruism, but it isn't astonishing in it's volume. I'm sure that of any suitably large group of people, the total dollar amount of donations to worthy causes will be well into the tens of thousands, which is basically what reddit's done here. You might call them kind of naive for doing things only about those causes that manage to get popular on reddit -- while reddit has some well-publicized random acts of kindness the overall impact of what they've done is pretty tiny.

Would some of those thousands of dollars have been better spent fighting malaria? I really can't say. Is it impressive to donate only to those causes that are presented in such a fashion as to jerk at the proverbial heart-strings? I should think not.

Is reddit above the rest of the Internet in its altruism? I would say perhaps not, but they're a good and valuable net community. There are many instances of Internet activism accomplishing something good, both inside and outside of reddit, and I would say that reddit's accomplishments are nothing short of pretty good.

olalonde• 16 years ago

How about a HN gift exchange this Christmas? Anyone else would be in?

pavs• 16 years ago

Don't hold your breath.

incogneato2• 16 years ago

pretty cool. too bad about that rally though, they had a bunch of dildos and communists and a killer on stage singing about peace.

davidw2• 16 years ago

I'm quite sick of reddit, to be honest. Many people there take delight in taking snarky, content-free swipes at others' hard work.

Maybe that is fun when you're 16, but it gets old after you've aged some.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

Never underestimate the capabilities of people who don't feel like working at work. I think the whole not doing anything for weeks at a time make people want to compensate somehow, and this is the result. Sending birthday cards to 90-year-olds and buying people new LCDs. Very nice.

radu_floricica• 16 years ago

Just an observation for those here who haven't spent a lot of time on reddit: the main page is _much_ more superficial then what you can get if you make an effort. When you're logged in you can subscribe and unsubscribe from subreddits. Once you get rid of pictures, wtf, politics and a couple more things already look a lot more mature... and then you can start looking for more obscure but rewarding ones.

A good example of what a smallish sub-forum can do, take a look at http://www.reddit.com/r/motorcycles/. This is a topic I'm interested in, but there are literally thousands of subreddits, smaller or bigger.

db42• 16 years ago

waiting to see similar list for HN :)

Reddit’s Astonishing Altruism

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