Reddit, Gawker, and The Freedom to Say Horrible Things

As a Redditor and someone who is interested in how online communities work, it’s been fascinating/sad to see what happened at Reddit over the past couple of weeks.

The initial decision by the company to fire a beloved employee touched off an angry user rebellion which eventually led to the harassment of CEO Ellen Pao by a smaller group of users and the CEO’s eventual resignation. The whole series of incidents revealed to me that Reddit consists of two factions that can be defined by how upset they were at Pao. These factions always existed, but recent events make the differences more visible.

It’s important to note that the size of these two factions are not as easy to measure as it initially seems. The highly vocal, negative anti-Pao sentiment (and, more generally, strong emotions about anything) is conspicuous while the size of the other, less vocal group must be inferred by the fact that the vast majority of content on the site has nothing to do with Pao or the recent controversy. The first group is much more highly invested in the site than the second group – it likely consists of a greater proportion of moderators, heavy users of the site, and people who bother to up/downvote Pao-related posts. But the second group is likely larger. The first group consists of “strange bedfellows”: those with legitimate gripes about the seemingly arbitrary and poorly communicated decisions of their leader and those who are simply predisposed to expressing hatred. 

The small group of people with ill will is influencing the fate of the site, but it isn't being done directly through the upvoting/downvoting of content or through posts or comments on the site. Instead, sites like Gawker and traditional news coverage focus on the small, vocal group with ill will and drive public perception of the entire site, which influences who participates or invests in the website. 

The misperception of Reddit promulgated by news stories is so beguiling in part because people judge online communities in much the same way that they judge offline communities. But Reddit isn’t a community in the ways that offline groupings of people like universities, neighborhoods or even countries are communities. It isn’t structured to be one shared experience or reflect a single, shared set of values. Proof of this: my experience of using Reddit changed very little during this upheaval (it was still mostly pictures of delicious hamburgers, science AMAs, and gifs of hilarious failed attempts at handshakes). By creating self-organizing sub-communities or "sub-reddits", the structure of Reddit (and perhaps the structure of other decentralized social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) facilitate distinct, individualized experiences. However, thanks to stories like the one in Gawker, this reality may ultimately matter less than public perception. 

And so I couldn't help but relish the irony when Gawker, immediately after mocking Reddit for having a crisis over what to do with hurtful, hateful content, had a crisis of its own when editor Tommy Craggs resigned after the Founder and CEO pulled a hurtful, hateful piece of content without consulting him. 

The cynical take on what happened at Reddit and Gawker is that these websites are getting popular and trying to make the next step toward profitability, making themselves appealing to advertisers by sanding off their rough edges and eliminating some types of content that the websites used to tolerate. In doing so, they are compromising the values of free speech and/or independent journalism. Gawker CEO Nick Denton states in an email to one of his employees that "These are the stories we used to do. But times have changed." Does this refer to the commercialization of Gawker and similar websites, or does it refer to the maturation of some of its leaders, a maturation which helped them realize that there are values other than free speech and getting web traffic, values like a consideration of the harm that words can do to others even when they are protected by law, and that sometimes these values come into conflict. Perhaps the phrase "times have changed" refers to both changes. Perhaps two forces - the commercial and the compassionate - are actually pushing in the same direction for once, against hurtful content, leaving libertarians on the other side, opposing both commerce and compassion (I don't like those odds).

In both the Reddit case and the Gawker case, the way in which the decisions to alter content were made (in a kind of sloppy, ad hoc way) left the company open to criticism. Personally, I side with the upper management of Reddit in their cleansing their site of hateful speech. With Gawker, it's trickier. I suppose I feel that they set themselves up by posting news stories that had so little value to begin with and were so obviously hurtful of others. Denton found himself, as he notes, in an impossible position: he had to either run a story that was "pure poison" to the reputation of the Gawker brand or know that some of his talent would resign in protest after he pulled the article.

But I think the major takeaway from this may be that the conflict at Gawker, like the conflict at Reddit, was kind of inevitable. You have hurtful content, and when you're small and the mainstream media doesn't draw attention to this content, you can get away with this. But once you get big and the eyes are on you, you either become associated with hurtful content or you change the brand's identity by restricting content, firing those who won't comply, and alienating part of your core users. Though I don't have that much sympathy for Denton, I find his remark about balancing the "calculus of cruelty and benefit" to be an encouraging sign for a purveyor of prurience (one that sounds oddly similar to Institutional Review Boards' policy regarding balancing risk and benefit in scientific studies).

To be sure, you can still say horrible, hurtful things on the Internet. Which raises the question: Where do Tommy Craggs and the libertarians leaving Reddit go? Do they all go to someplace like Vice Media? What does Vice do when all this happens to them? Is hate like energy: incapable of being created or destroyed, only redirected?

Puppies & Iraq

I just saw Page One, a documentary about the New York Times, which raised some interesting (if oft repeated) questions about journalism that come along with the financial instability of the industry: is there something about a traditional media outlet like the NYTimes that is superior to the various information disseminating alternatives (news aggregation sites, twitter, Facebook, Huffpo, Daily Kos, Gawker, etc.) and, if so, what is it? What is it about the New York Times (or the medium of newspapers in general) that would be missed if it was gone?

Bernard Berelson asked a similar question in a study of newspaper readers who were deprived of their daily newspaper due to a workers' strike in 1945. The reasons people liked (or perhaps even needed) the paper back then - social prestige, as an escape or diversion, as a welcome routine or ritual, to gather information about public affairs - are all met by various other websites and applications, some of which seem to be "better" - that is, more satisfying to the user - at one or all of these things than any newspaper is.

I want to pick apart this idea of that which is "more satisfying" to the user, or what it means to say that they "want" something. The mantra of producers in the free market, no matter what they're selling, is that they must give the people what they want. Nick Denton of Gawker has a cameo in Page One in which he talks about his "big board", the one that provides Gawker writers with instant feedback about how many hits (and thus, how many dollars) their stories are generating. Sam Zell, owner of the Tribune media company, voiced a similar opinion: those in the information dissemination business should give people what they want. Ideally, you make enough money to do "puppies and Iraq" - something that people want and something that people should want. To do anything else is, to use Zell's phrase, "journalistic arrogance".

Certainly, a large number of people are "satisfied" with the information they get from people like Denton and Zell. But Denton and Zell, like any businessmen, can only measure satisfaction in certain ways: money, or eyeballs on ads. There are other, often long-term social, costs paid when people get what they supposedly want. When news is market driven, the public interest suffers. So goes the argument of many cultural theorists. But who are they to say what the public interest is? Why do we need ivory tower theorists to save the masses from themselves?

Maybe that elitist - the one who would rather read a story about Iraq than look at puppies - is not in an ivory tower but inside of all of us, along with an inner hedonist (that's the one that would rather look at puppies all day). There are many ways to measure what people like, want, need, or prefer. I'm not talking about measuring happiness as opposed to money spent/earned. I'm considering what happens when we're asked to pay for certain things (bundled vs. individually sold goods) at certain times (in advance of the moment of consumption vs. immediately before the moment of consumption). There is plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that those two variables, along with many others situational variables external to the individual, alter selection patterns of individuals. Want, or need, or preference does not merely emanate from individuals. When we take this into account, we recognize that a shift in the times at which individuals access options and the way those options are bundled together end up altering what we choose. We click on links to videos of adorable puppies instead of links to stories about Iraq because they're links (right in front of us, immediate) and because they've already been paid for (every internet site is bundled together, and usually bundled together with telephone and 200 channels of television). If it wasn't like that, if we had to make a decision at the beginning of the year about whether we "wanted" to spend all year watching puppy videos or reading about Iraq...well, I guess not that many people would want to spend all year reading about Iraq. But I reckon that many people would want, would choose some combination of puppies and Iraq if they had to choose ahead of time. The internet is a combination of what we want and what we should want, and so is the NYTimes, but they represent a different balance between those two things. The Times is 100 parts puppies, 400 parts Iraq. The internet is 10000000000 parts puppies, 100000000 Iraq (or something to that effect. When you change how things are sold, you may not change what people want, as many theorists claim, but you do change how we measure what people want.

Maybe we never have to defer to a theorist to tell us what we should be reading or watching in order to be a better citizen. Maybe we just need to tweak our media choice environment so that it gives the inner elitist a fighting chance against the inner hedonist.

The Medium is the Message: Blog

Reading this recent article in the New Yorker on blog magnate Nick Denton prompted me to revisit McLuhan's adage that the medium is the message. I do not take this phrase to mean that content has no significant effect beyond the medium by which it is accessed, but rather that the medium can influence what content people end up choosing and thus alter the media experience. I also take "medium" not to mean all internet applications but to mean various websites or applications that allow users access to information in unique ways.

Denton's blog empire, which includes Gawker, Gizmodo, and Deadspin, feature a subtle but important tweak to the standard blog format (eloquently encapsulated by Ben McGrath as "links with commentary, presented in reverse chronological order"): it presents statistics on how many people have read and commented on each article. Denton also pays his writers based on the amount of readers their articles garner. There is a kind of herd mentality in readers: they read what is popular, and the more they do this, the more popular those particular articles become. It is worth asking whether the content preferred in this system is different from a system where writers and editors take it upon themselves to design the format and layout of an online publication (as is the case with traditional blogs and online news sites like NYTimes). In the New Yorker article, there seems to be agreement among journalists on both sides of the traditionalist/new wave divide that such a format leads to more "sensational" news preference.

This way of presenting news seems somehow more democratic than traditional editor-selected alternatives. It sounds as though it provides more choice, and that would be better, wouldn't it? In a way, Gawker's innovation is similar to what Google or Reddit or Digg do: they take tons of raw information and they privilege the most popular links. That judgment as to what is worthwhile is made very quickly by users. They scan headlines and if the headline is interesting enough, they click on it. The assumption that this is somehow good rests on some other fundamental assumptions worth questioning:

• We are being held back by gatekeepers (editors) from what we really want. We are used to having the type of content or experiences we have access to being controlled by gatekeepers who may not have our best interests at heart. As long as we can choose for our "selves", we'll be fine. This is, in turn, based on another assumption
  
• As individuals, we are single, desiring, decision-making selves with stable, unique sets of desires.
  

Returning to the "medium is the message" mantra, we could consider the difference between the concerns over television and the concerns over the internet. The case against television was always a case against content. Watching television was bad because most of what was on television was so bad. By contrast, the case against the internet is a case against its users. There are wonderful, amazing, informative, pro-social, productive things one can do on the internet: create and run a business or a charity, disseminate useful, accurate information, take a course online. If people fail to do these things, its not because there is any lack of positive options from which to choose, so it must be their fault.

Denton gives people what they want, and its not the caliber of people that he's polling that leads to the move away from hard news toward gossip. Its the fact that he's accessing our inner hedonists, our immediate selves.