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Perhaps Reddit can save me from awfulness of Buzzfeed.

About a year ago I added Buzzfeed to my reading list in order to try and keep my middle aged self even marginally connected to the Zeitgeist of popular culture.  To be fair it has more or less served that purpose and I no longer feel completely clueless when everyone on the internet suddenly starts talking about "Gangam Style" or  "Sharknado" or "Twerking". Unfortunately in order to glean these precious nugget of knowledge you must endure an awful lot of truly dreadful content on Buzzfeed itself. Stuff like this for example: http://www.buzzfeed.com/alannaokun/products-that-will-vastly-improve-your-relationship. The sad part is I am not sure that article was even supposed to be tongue in cheek.

Anyway the good news is that I have been lurking on Reddit for a while and I have come to the conclusion that Reddit, despite its somewhat murky past appears to have become respectable and extremely topical. Prime Ministers even use it and the murkier bits are well hidden if they are even still there. Better still Reddit is extremely current. I have noticed that many of the better articles on Buzzfeed seem to appear on Reddit a day or so earlier while the really crappy stuff comes directly from Buzzfeed's own editoral staff.  Sure you still get some dire stuff on Reddit but the "many eyeballs" filtering system seems to bury the really objectionable stuff pretty well.

I signed up for a Reddit account today moving from  lurker to a participant but I have yet to figure out how the whole contributing and voting system works. In any case I think Buzzfeed's days on my reading list are numbered. There is only so much more of this  that I can take.
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Comments

Azuriel said…
I've been on Reddit for maybe about a year, and yeah, it's pretty fantastic for all sorts of purposes. For example, /r/PlanetSide is the best place for PlanetSide 2 news; better than SOE's own PS2 forums, IMO.

As for the voting system, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Upvotes make things more visible, downvotes can hide comments/threads after they receive enough. The Karma itself you get from upvotes isn't used for anything.
4:12 pm
mbp said…
Yes Azuriel I am only just discovering subreddits. Of course the problem now is information overload :)
6:59 pm
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