Mills, Richard (2011) Researching Social News – Is reddit.com a mouthpiece for the ‘Hive Mind’, or a Collective Intelligence approach to Information Overload? In: ETHICOMP 2011 Proceedings :. Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield.
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Abstract
Distributed moderation and filtering systems are becoming increasingly common on the web. This paper examines reddit.com, a Social News website where users vote to determine which stories will be featured in high-visibility locations. User voting activity and attention are found to be highly concentrated on the website’s front page. The consequences of this are considered, chiefly by studying reddit’s coverage of a major news story. Minority opinions are found to be slightly marginalised but not excluded from high-visibility locations. The paper concludes by discussing some positive and negative effects of the emphasis reddit places on its front page and the collective decisions about which items appear there.