The First Charge

Alright redditers, it's time we stop acting like a bunch of elitist, angst-ridden teenagers, and try to actually think about what type of content we support on this site. It's a sad waste to use this site simply as a means to pass the hours, or to convince ourselves that creationists are illogical, or that global warming is real. It's been going on for a year or two now; we all get it, and we all agree on it.

We must realize that we are a fairly homogeneous group. The majority of us are skeptics (and accordingly atheists), or at least support classical anti-religious stances. We are a left-leaning group; we are science-oriented; we are interested in politics; we are big on technology/programming/computers; we are heavily supportive of free speech, free expression, and free exchange of information.

So are we just entertaining ourselves here? Are we just preaching to the choir over and over again with the same crap to convince ourselves that our views are correct and superior to other peoples' views? We post so many articles about how things are wrong with the US, the government, the world, and the environment, and we somehow think that we are improving something just by reading about it. Unfortunately, no matter how much we read about these issues, we are doing only that: reading. We’re not helping the problem anymore than that guy driving around with a Jesus fish on his car. Unless the articles actually inform us and give us a better global perspective of these issues, all we do on this site amounts to mental masturbation.

My charge to you is to start thinking a bit more about what we vote up or vote down. For example, sure it'd be fun to watch Dawkins plug his same sound bite over and over again, all the while patting ourselves on the back for agreeing with him --- but this is completely pointless. If we actually care about fixing religious-related issues, we need to stop obsessing over ourselves and spend a bit more time learning about why exactly religious people are so resistant to ideas that seem overly obvious and logical to us. We need to spend time reading and trading ideas about how to fix the problem. Just winning a battle of logic about the existence of God with your Christian friend doesn't convince him of anything; it just makes you feel superior, and often makes him take an even more radical stance. And this is the same with all of the common reddit issues. Let's stop using reddit as a means only to bitch about problems or to inflate our egos, and let’s start using it as a means for realistically attacking these problems.

I think we can look at the 60s counterculture revolution for some sort of comparison. Although they ultimately failed with the psychedelic revolution (for reasons Hunter S. Thompson states very poetically), they still made a dent. And they achieved this by not just reading newspapers about what was going wrong, but by direct action --- by participation. They made themselves visible, and they were not forceful and pretentious. They were not exclusionists, but “inclusionists.” Reddit, as it currently stands, it 100% exclusion based: if you don't agree with our positions, screw off. Is this a logical way to encourage others to join our positions?

So let's not fool ourselves here. As it currently stands we are at the breaking point between letting reddit become just a posting board for the latest public display of our common ideas, or rather becoming a place where those people who are truly interested in these ideas can come and gain perspective and trade thoughts about what needs to be done.

And all that needs to be done for now is to start thinking a bit more about the usefulness of what we vote up, and just as importantly, to start thinking about what we are posting. I know it's cool when you IM your friend and tell him #6 on the front page is yours, but I hope enough of us can resist the mighty force that is karma (which is more-or-less the online equivalent of monopoly money, sorry to burst your bubble).

I say all of this out of sincere interest in the power that reddit has, and what it can become. I hope there are enough redditers who feel the same way; who feel the content of reddit slipping, and who care enough to make an effort to improve this site rather than abuse it. If we think the internet, and reddit in particular, has any sort of power as a free exchange of uncensored information, we must realize that as such, we are the only ones with the power to maintain its integrity and its usefulness. There’s no one policing us or looking over our shoulder --- we are it. And as its sole defenders, we have an obligation to take on this challenge.