Add a Comment Now - We Want to Hear From You
By Brian Boyko
On Wednesday, Reddit.com, a Web 2.0 site where people discuss the news of the day, was overwhelmed on its front page by calls for the impeachment of President George W. Bush, locking out all other news stories. And the way it happened provides some interesting observations on Web 2.0, 21st century society, and network administration.
A less cliquish version of Digg, Reddit is ultimately very simple. Stories are linked in order of popularity over time. Hit the up button to vote for a story to be placed higher in the rankings, down button to place it lower in the rankings.
From a journalism/new media perspective, sites like Reddit are absolutely fascinating. Before the advent of blogging, journalists used to talk about gatekeepers – reporters and editors who choose what to cover, how to cover it, and what emphasis it is given. A story on the front page is given more emphasis than one buried in the back pages – and therefore, more people will read it and more people will think it is significant.
Blogs and blogging took this to the next step in that anyone could become a gatekeeper by publishing their own blog and figuring out what they thought was important. Readers also could act as their own gatekeeper and simply go to the stories that they think are important. It removed the gatekeeper as the arbiter of importance.
Sites like Reddit are a logical next step. In blogging, the blogger takes on the gatekeeper role – but it is still as much an elitist position as far as the blogger writes about what he or she thinks is important. Reddit and its Web 2.0 kin allow for the gatekeeper role to be supplanted by a reasonable facsimile of direct democracy.
And what you have is a situation where the wisdom of crowds takes hold. Who better to determine what “the people” find important than the people themselves?
(Continued...)
Of course, from time to time the wisdom of crowds gives way to a mob mentality. Somewhere along the line, the number of impeachment stories on Reddit reached a tipping point, and once reached, nothing could stop the torrent of a continued trend as people rushed to register their disapproval with the president.
We’ll not care to discuss whether the call on Reddit for impeachment is valid or warranted. Nor will we deign to mark it as evidence of either a “mob mentality” or of “the wisdom of crowds.”
But the important thing is that this pattern represents a cascade, if you will, of traffic. As multiple submissions calling for Bush’s impeachment landed on the front page, this prompted others to continue to add to the trend. The more links on the front page calling for impeachment, the more incentive there was to participate in it; as nothing breeds success like success.
This may have sent a strong message that Reddit’s readership overwhelmingly supports the idea of impeachment. But it also took up all of Reddit’s front page – “filling the pipe,” if you were. This kind of cascading behavior can happen in a network as well, as people spread a meme around the workplace, causing an exponential increase in the number of people who each grab at the same resource – for example an embarrassing video of the CEO, or a particularly interesting product demo, gets forwarded from one person to another via e-mail, tying up the network, again, exponentially. One person’s torrent traffic goes unnoticed so other people believe it to be okay to use BitTorrent on the LAN.
Notice that these behaviors are not like computer worms; worms never stop tying up traffic. These traffic patterns tend to burst – no matter how large the company, eventually everyone’s heard the news/seen the video. While these traffic patterns tend to go away after a short time – Reddit is now currently serving up regular front pages again – the fact that they do go away can make it difficult for the people in the data center to figure out what exactly happened, and how to prevent it from happening again, without constant network monitoring.
