My kids and I tag team various sites and apps, championing and promoting and remaining steadfast to our favorites while spurning others that don't make our personal cut. I am the Google Queen. Drive, Docs, News, Photos, Music, YouTube of course - just about any product Google offers, I'm in. My daughter is pretty Internet savvy. She is all about Pinterest right now. She has a Facebook page, has had her own website, blog, Tumblr, Photo Bucket, used to do MySpace, is a wiz on chatting and a fellow Gmail user. My son was the longest holdout for any kind of tech stuff. He texts regularly but won't do Twitter. He barely checks email unless money or grandparents are involved. He has a FB page but doesn't do much with it, at least not the public one that Mom can see. So I was a little surprised when he mentioned a couple of current news topics and said he heard about them on Reddit.
I had heard of Reddit and had checked it out a few years ago when I was also looking at Digg and some other news conglomeration sites that I have since forgotten. I took another look recently but was turned off by the whole popularity angle. Apparently links are submitted and everybody on Reddit votes on the ones they like. Sort of like a virtual high school homecoming contest. The more votes a post gets, the higher up it appears on the scroll list. A bunch of people not in my peer group (middle aged empty nester) voting on stuff I didn't care about (video games, flavored vodka, out-of-focus pet photos) didn't seem like the best way to evaluate newsworthiness.
Game changer: Obama was a guest on a Reddit feature called Ask Me Anything. I know this because I saw the Forbes interview blurb on the Google News feed. That sentence alone should tell you how I like my Internet news! Anyway - I thought if Reddit was good enough for The President of The United States, I better give it another look.
Overall my reaction is still m'eh. I don't like the color (or lack thereof) or the layout. The posts at the top of some lists were 'sponsored', meaning someone paid big bucks to have their post at the top of the list. Should this be allowed? I understand the Reddit folks want to monetize their site, but doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of a site based on the popularity of the posts? I guess if it's okay for Google . . . The non-sponsored posts were mostly uninteresting to me, way too Notice Me! or juvenile. And very little organization, if any. Perfect for those of us with ADD but not great for organized, productive news-seeking.
However. I did see one post that piqued my interest and kept my visit to Reddit from being a waste of click time:
The Hulk is now the main character of your favorite movie. How would that change it?
One random post in a sea of thousands had me scrolling and smiling. One random post has inspired dozens of fun ideas for future blog entries. So thank you to my son, the nice folks at Reddit, and the former President of the United States for leading the way to yet another site that will kill hours of my time. Beats cleaning toilets.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, I hope you'll take a minute to subscribe to my blog (the subscribe box is near the top of the right sidebar).