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Reddit Digest: December 29, 2011

Redditors turn their outrage to U.S. Senators who support the Stop Online Piracy Act while others question the effectiveness and necessity of the site's Web vigilance. 

 

Kevin Morris

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Posted on Dec 29, 2011   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 11:20 pm CDT

With 30 million unique visitors and close to 2 billion page views a month, it’s safe to say a lot happens on the link-sharing and discussion site Reddit every day. There are more than 90,000 sections on the site; a single discussion alone can sometimes attract more than 10,000 comments.

How can anyone keep track of it all? Our daily Reddit digest highlights the most interesting or important discussions from around the site—every morning.

  • Redditors, encouraged by their victory over GoDaddy, turn their outrage to U.S. Senators who support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). I noted in a story yesterday that this isn’t likely to go anywhere: Every election cycle, senators face much more powerful and organized opposition than just about anything Reddit could whip up. But in/r/TheoryOfReddit, has some interesting thoughts about how social media actually can bring down a politician: “No politician will be ruined just for voting on a piece of legislation. Maybe they can be embarrassed, and maybe some other new, ‘renegade’ candidate can give them an electorate challenge, but reddit can’t do this. What I think reddit could do would be to expose something scandalous.” (/r/TheoryOfReddit)

  • One of the reps in redditors’ targets was Paul Alan (R-WI). Big surprise: His opponent in the upcoming election jumped into the fray with an AMA. (/r/IAmA)

  • Irish redditors put their heads together and listed the weirdest phrases they’ve ever heard. That’s right; this stuff is Irish weird, phrases like “Teacher, he hobbled me fudgey!” (/r/ireland)

  • An AMA request actually worked. Who’d have guessed? Hours after a request for the founder of the Khan Academy—a free online educational resource—was posted, the man himself, Salman Khan, showed up. (/r/IAmA)

  • Rebecca Watson’s essay, “Reddit makes me hate atheists,” has been picked up all over Reddit. The most recent place is at /r/TrueReddit, where it has generated an astonishing 2,866 comments. The key question seems to be this: Should the sexism that Watson profiled on /r/atheism stand as an indictment of just that subreddit or of Reddit as a whole? (/r/TrueReddit)

  • Is there any way to prevent Reddit witch hunts, asks Dylnuge, referring specifically to the site’s war against disgraced social marketer Paul Christoforo. “You cant prevent it. It’s mob mentality moving at the speed of the internet,” glyserinesoul rightly observes. (/r/TheoryOfReddit)

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*First Published: Dec 29, 2011, 11:40 am CST