If you get most of your news and entertainment online, you are already familiar with the influence of Reddit — whether you realize it or not.
Over the last several years, the social news site has fundamentally changed how millions of people learn about breaking news and the latest cat videos. Content that goes viral, to use a tired phrase, often either originates on the site or gains popularity there first before it hits the rest of the Internet.
As the name of the site implies, by the time others share that interesting article on Facebook, you’ve already “read it” on Reddit.
But Reddit’s whirlpool of photos, videos and discussion is no longer just spilling into other parts of the Internet haphazardly. The site is now required reading for journalists at traffic-hungry news sites. Much of the click-bait you see on the Huffington Post or BuzzFeed likely got its start on one of the thousands of Reddit communities, known as subreddits, where average users share interesting links.
What makes Reddit such a beacon to journalists, however, is that other users effectively curate the best content through a democratic process of upvotes and downvotes.
“I’m aware, I think that all of Reddit is aware, that news organizations use us as sourcing both for stories, and to see whats going on in the comment sections,” said XLII, one of the moderators of r/Canada, the largest Canadian subreddit on the site.
The r/Canada subreddit has over 100,000 subscribers and acts as the de facto town square for countless Canadians across the country. It’s also probably the first bookmark web editors in Canadians newsrooms check every morning (including here at Canada.com).
“I certainly don’t begrudge the media using a tool like Reddit to find stories to talk about,” said XLII over Reddit’s private chat system. “I do however wish that they would uphold at times the journalistic integrity that Reddit as a social site does not.”
XLII is one of six moderators on r/Canada who have the self-assigned task of keeping the Canadian forum interesting, spam-free and on-topic.
“Yeah, it’s quite odd to see things in the news that I read about days ago on Reddit,” said fellow moderator Lucky75. “I constantly have family and friends link to stories of “breaking news”, and most of the time I don’t have the heart to tell them that I’ve already read it (Reddit).”
r/Canada in general seems to have a more polite tone than a lot of the other national subreddits.
Lucky75 said most people on the site don’t mind seeing their work featured elsewhere, “but if we have a user that does all the groundwork and investigative reporting, they should at least get some credit for it, or at least not have their work passed off as someone else’s.”
That message appears to have gotten through to news outlets since BuzzFeed was famously outed as sourcing many of its irresistible lists from photos and memes originally uploaded by Redditors — without credit. BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti subsequently apologized and established better crediting standards on the site.
He told Mashable, “We were very concerned we were pissing off people in that community.”
And with good reason. The relationship between Reddit and news outlets is sometimes symbiotic and sometimes parasitic. The social news site is both where journalists find stories and where some stories can blow up and result in valuable traffic. (And, hopefully, ad revenue.)
Gawker, another outlet that aggregates much of its shareable content from the social news site, got into trouble with Redditors after it published the name of one of its worst trolls, a man who was responsible for some of the seediest parts of Reddit such as a subreddit for posting sexualized images of underage girls.
Revealing a person’s real name, known as “doxing” someone, is one of the gravest sins you can commit on Reddit. The Reddit hive mind retaliated by banning links to Gawker from most of its most popular subreddits, shutting off a vital source of pageviews for the gossip site.
Yet, for all the drama surrounding Reddit in the U.S. — with the recent Boston Bombing being another unpleasant episode in the site’s history — the r/Canada community is an ocean of calm by comparison.
“I don’t know that we do anything differently,” said Lucky75, noting that discussions don’t often get out of control on r/Canada.
“Obviously the more seedy subreddits have some issues that we clearly don’t have to deal with. I don’t particularly support them, although I do appreciate the ‘anything goes’ mindset of the site. … It’s nice to have a place to go and discuss things where one doesn’t have to worry as much about censorship.”
“r/Canada in general seems to have a more polite tone than a lot of the other national subreddits, but that doesn’t hold true as a constant,” said XLII.
The discussions on r/Canada during the Idle No More protests, in particular, sailed into some choppy waters. For a while, it seemed nothing could be posted on the subreddit without discussion degenerating into hateful displays of ignorance about aboriginal people. But by and large, it’s just a place to find news. For growing numbers of people, Reddit now acts as their default homepage, news source and social network.
XLII reminds journalists trolling the site for content to remember the basics, though.
“Just because people are spreading it on social media, just because it’s being retweeted doesn’t in my opinion give the press [the right] to report what someone says in a comment on Reddit as fact. That’s lazy journalism.”
Related articles
- Reddit vs. the Media (slate.com)
- The Truth About Reddit | Ad Age (adage.com)
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