The power of Reddit for good
Yesterday, a user of Reddit posted a photo of an African man with a massive scar atop his forehead. The text read:
Meet Omari. Two days ago he returned from the hospital after being hacked in the face by a machete defending an orphanage of 35 children by himself. Think we could raise the $2,000 needed for the remainder of the cement/barbed wire wall to keep both him and the children safe?
My son Matthew, who is a Reddit user, just showed me the photo of Omari and the suggestion.
“Matt, I can’t use my blog to raise money for anybody,” I said.
“No, Dad, that’s not what I’m showing you this for. They raised $65,000 for the orphanage. Once they confirmed that Omari’s story was legit, everybody started giving. Look at this.”
The original Redditor who posted the appeal for the orphanage wrote on the site:
$44,000!!!!!!!!! REDDIT!!!!! I can hardly breathe. I refreshed the page at least twice to make sure it was real. I cannot believe this. I just came back from the orphanage….. Let’s just say many tears were shed, and many hugs were shared. The children were all leaving to school as I arrived, but I will return around 6pm to take a group picture. I am about to upload the picture and video of Omari’s thanks. He’s been reading all of your comments, he said he’ll read every one if it takes him all day. $44,000. Reddit, thank you.
At last count, as Matthew said, they’d raised even more money to help Omari protect these children from thugs. Unbelievable what people can do through the web. Reddit, thank you. ZDNet covers this story, and other good things Redditors have done in this way.
Good for the redditors, but I’m not sure this redeems all the other unsavory content in that virtual cesspool.
Redditors: Very generous. Also, kind of potty mouthed.
Just Some Guy: “Kind of potty-mouthed”? That is the proverbial understatement of the epoch. Reddit–which in my experience is only a slightly sanitized version of 4chan (because there are fewer instances of random child pornography?)–is clear evidence of the sheer depravity of our decadent Western culture. In fact, I can’t even muster words appropriate to encompass the scope of depravity that one can find there completely at random. Stand-up comedy is “kind of potty-mouthed.” Reddit is…words fail again.
I enjoy the comparative intellectual and linguistic anarchy afforded by the internet. But it comes with a price–namely, Reddit, etc. The only time I’m tempted to utter the word “censorship” approvingly. Which is a shame, because there’s also a lot of truly hilarious stuff on Reddit et al. But…again, words fail. At the very least, I’m sincerely tempted not to allow my future children to have access to the internet. At all. Even as they lambast the easy accessibility of pornography on the web, I honestly think most middle-aged adults can’t conceive of what is right there, just a click away, on some of the web’s most popular venues. “Pornographic” doesn’t even begin to articulate the problem.
Anyway, off-topic moralizing. This is a heartwarming story.
In part, this is what I was referring to the other day about America as a third world culture. Your son, like so many of his generation, are part of a new, and growing, shared cultural experience that has escaped the notice of so many boomers. All they see is the demise of a mid-20th century America, so they conclude (incorrectly, in my opinion) that a collapse is imminent.
I hope the thugs don’t read about them getting this money, and return to steal it.
OK, here’s what’s weird. This is the first I’m learning about how profane Reddit is. Matthew is very, very scrupulous about such things. On a couple of occasions, I’ve given him adult novels to read that I thought he was ready for, but he’s brought them back saying that the profanity makes him uncomfortable, and he can’t finish it — and he’s visibly uncomfortable. Same with watching movies that I think he can handle; profanity, or gory violence, makes him visibly uncomfortable, and he asks us to turn it off. I love that about him.
So why is he into Reddit, if it’s so profane? I’m going to have to ask him what the deal is.
Rod, Reddit is huge and consists of the front page and many sub-groups. For example /r/aww consists of entirely cute animal photos, and there are technology and gaming sub-groups as well.
It is entirely possible your son has not encountered the adult content sections because they are not on the front page. You have to know to look for it and I didn’t know it was there for several years of use. It is not nearly as out there as 4 chan which will melt your brain.
The front page is an amalgam of content which at times can be potty mouthed (and funny), but most of it would have a PG-13 rating.
You have to know to look for it and I didn’t know it was there for several years of use.
Patently false. Go to reddit’s front page. Click on the “WTF” tab. Feast your eyes on various links labeled “NSFW.” Again, this is just the front page. And it goes downhill from there, if you know where to look. And it doesn’t take much knowledge to know. I can’t even type the names of some of the more vulgar threads, much less describe the content. You’re right: as I myself conceded, there’s a lot of truly hilarious and generally innocuous content on Reddit, which is why I occasionally browse there. But that’s just it: it’s all right there, which is merely emblematic of the internet as a whole.
I’m not criticizing Rod or his son–far from it. I am confident that he is confining himself to the “safe” content on Reddit.
But here’s the thing: moral traditionalists, geographical regionalists, anti-globalists, and their allies have long criticized television for its transmission and enculturation of a vapid, morally vacuous (or even patently corrupting), Americanizing, homogenizing way-of-being. Yet, while all this is true, television is still governed by professional industry standards, the FCC, and various parental watch groups. If my child turns on a random network (not “premium networks,” of course, which, significantly, I can block from my home entirely without losing the other content), he’s not likely to see anything utterly appalling or depraved, especially not while watching Spongebob or whatever (assuming you don’t find Spongebob appalling and depraved).
The internet, on the other hand, is also responsible in the past few decades for transmitting and enculturating a particular way of being–and it is one that is utterly unconstrained by any boundaries whatsoever. Reddit is paradigmatic: one can be giggling at amusing pictures of kittens (the equivalent of watching Spongebob, though these kitten photos are perfectly likely to be captioned with profanity); a few clicks later, one can be literally bombarded with unspeakably graphic pornography and vile racism, among other things. And there’s no good method I’ve yet found to censor the bad stuff on the internet reliably without restricting access to the useful (and sometimes necessary) good stuff other than unplugging. There is a reason that the elementary school playground was much less vulgar twenty years ago than it is now; I’m truly horrified by what comes out of the mouths of babes these days–words that none of my eight-year-old peers knew or would dare to repeat back then.
So, does a charitable act on the part of a few Redditors make up for all the other stuff?
Rod,
Reddit is a massive hierarchical site with thousands of content specific subreddits (http://www.reddit.com/reddits/), and some do indeed contain pornographic images. The most popular, “pics”, “funny”, “wtf”, “til” (today I learned), “iama” (I am a…), and are fairly tame. The choice of which subreddits to view is entirely up to the individual, however.
I suggest you ask your son to show you which of the subreddits he subscribes to, and even to sit with him for a half hour and experience the site as he does.
I like stories like this. Random acts of kindness and all that are wonderful. But I can’t help but feel that coming to Reddit’s (or any other site’s) notice is sort of like winning the lottery. Yes, one person or group has their life transformed, but plenty of others with similar plights are ignored.
I’ve personally gotten kind of hooked on Kiva.org, which does micro-lending to individuals, mostly to help with setting up or improving existing small (often very small) businesses. The neat thing is that instead of collecting a big huge pot of money and then disbursing it as Kiva sees fit, you get to go in and pick the person you want to lend your money to. You get your principal back.
I’ve been doing this for some years now. I throw in an extra $25 (the maximum you can lend to any one person; multiple $25 loans are bundled together to reach the amount that the loan is for) whenever I get a chance and just keep the money that gets paid back recirculating out to other loans. I’ve never once had anyone default on me, and from time to time you even get some good status updates about how the people you lent to are doing.
Rob an Rod, I agree with R Hampton that wtf is usually fairly tame. Nsfw usually indicates content you would not want seen on a work computer, but is not pornography. However sometimes inappropriate material makes its way way there because the entire site is user generated content and policed via user reports.
When you stray into the adult area there’s an 18+ interstitial page which tells you. Now that would not stop a teen who wants to go there. But a Google image search will return an eyeful too with the right search terms.
Without question, reddit is a net positive for society. And, if you’re somewhat tech-savvy and willing to put in the time required of a parent, it’s not difficult to control the content your children see on the internet.
Thanks for that tip Geoff G.! Might check that out with the kids.
Rod, you may just have to accept that certain seemingly non-ideological spheres of the internet (art, especially video games, digital technology, “Internet culture,” certain lowbrow types of comedy, and so on) have ideological, guileful sorts of people who hate you and your ideas and live like it. There’s a rudeness and mob mentality about libertinism that’s coupled with this good sort of groupthink.
It’s still possible to compartmentalize what is good about a NeoGAF or 4chan/2chan, which is why I’m sure he likes them. Frankly, it might even be good for him. Either way, it’s the new norm (see: Anonymous), so understand what the thing is, counsel him, and then let him be. My generation is going to have to live with this coarseness that’s unfamiliar to you.