Reddit and community journalism
I've come to love Reddit. What started as a better Digg (and is yet another happy outcome of the remarkable Y Combinator) has turned into a way of sharing and interrogating news. Reddit as it stands is not the future of news. It is, however, a hope for news.
Context & Ripple Effects
Written days after ReadWriteWeb framed Digg's New Newswire as a radical experiment in social news, David Weinberger's post stakes out the other side of that 2011 moment: the aggregator built as an improved Digg — and incubated at Y Combinator — has quietly become something more than a link list. His claim is deliberately modest: Reddit is not the future of news, but a way of sharing and interrogating it.
First-order effects
- Reddit's voting communities now function as a distributed front page where readers interrogate submissions rather than just consume them, putting its user-editors in direct competition with Digg's relaunched newswire for the same audience.
Second-order effects
- Digg's radical newswire redesign forces the comparison Weinberger implies: whichever platform better supports questioning and context around links, not just ranking them, wins the community-journalism role.
Third-order effects
- If community interrogation proves durable, news distribution shifts from editor-selected front pages toward moderated crowds whose judgment — and whose moderation failures — become part of the journalistic record itself.
The trend: Social news is moving from algorithmic or editor-curated ranking toward community-moderated spaces that both distribute and interrogate reporting.