Knowing your sources

When I was in high school, I remember hearing about and reading Reddit for the first time. This was my first encounter with a site that had user-voted content. It’s a little embarassing to admit now, but I remember thinking something like “wow, that’s a great idea! All the best posts and ideas will get voted to the top!”

In hindsight, I think it was naive of me to think this way, but on the other hand, that was clearly the logic behind such a system. After having many years to use, overuse, tire of, and finally quit Reddit, I managed to learn that what gets votes online does not generally correlate with genuine value.

But even if the principle behind Reddit were true, and the cream always rose to the top, I think I would still have a more fundamental problem with such a system. When you read something on Reddit, it usually doesn’t matter who they are. With the exception of things like high-profile AMAs* or the rare gimmick account, most users are not anyone you’d know from anyone else on the site.

Offline, when you talk to people, you usually know who you are talking to, or you at least know something about them. This gives you critical context for how you interpret what they say and how you communicate with them. On the open internet, lacking any distinguishing features between different users, I find that the different voices start to blend together.

In this low-context mush, I wind up catching onto recurring patterns of ideas rather than specific users. But without any knowledge of where these ideas are coming from, it becomes difficult to intepret and respond in a reasonable way. I think the feeling that you are directly interacting with ideas instead of real people you could know is a source of a lot of fighting on the internet.

Anyway, I’ve come to prefer websites and formats that come from sources I know and choose to return to, whether that’s a blog, a channel, or a small community like Ctrl-C. These known sources end up having much higher quality and much lower volume than the infinite feeding trough of normal social media. Best of all, their value comes not only from their content, but from the context you can only build up from repeated interaction, so the longer you follow a specific source, the more value you’ll tend to get out of it.

Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club.

* For the unfamiliar, “Ask Me Anything” is a part of Reddit where a user (sometimes a celebrity or public figure) can host a big, open Q&A session with anyone on the site.