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Well, so much for Reddit

Posted on: 2007-10-14

For a while, I was kind of enjoying the new round of Web 2.0 news sites. Digg was okay, but I found Reddit more to my taste. About six months ago, it started getting silly - but I kept going by every so often, just for the car-wreck ludicrousness of it all. I stopped doing even that about a month ago, but every so often I go back to see if it has improved. Top item today:

VOTE UP if you want GEORGE BUSH in Prison!!

I guess not. It's not the point they're making (heck Bush probably does belong in jail for various reasons) as much as the pointlessness of the headline. It's just self-congratulatory cheerleading to the converted with a strong whiff of a high school club. Like anyone is going to vote NO, right?

I've noticed that as one gets older, one doesn't necessarily feel older or notice one's peers as older, but younger people start looking much younger. Maybe it's the same way with discussions. I'm not a 19-year-old fresh from reading either Noam Chomsky or Ayn Rand (or both) who wants online validation for my first actual political thoughts. I hadn't really noticed my tastes and opinions changing, but I am finding a lot more arguments sound really juvenile these days. That's not just online forums - even the provincial election we just had seemed to be about really simplistic issues "He said he wouldn't raise taxes but he did!" "He wants to set up a theocracy with public funding for religious schools!" "Waaah"

Thankfully Reddit has split out separate 'programming' and 'business' subreddits. The programming one is pretty good - although it does get a little whiny when there's an article strongly for or against Ruby on Rails. The business one is still new and doesn't seem to have much community in it yet - on weekends, it has been filling up with spam postings.

They both sure beat the newspaper, though.

... and in true Web 2.0 spirit, someone has combined all of the annoying 'Vote Up' posts into one big list. Now you can conveniently get all of your annoying in one place.

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