Enthnography Results, Week 3

As I delved deeper into the Politics section of Reddit, my generalizations from last week were, for the most part, supported.  The majority of the most popular stories this week concerned the protests occuring in Wisconsin, and all of these postings (that I saw) were from a liberal/left viewpoint.  The comments on these stories generally varied from things like "Wisconsin is the new Egypt" to "Gov. Walker hates the working class" to "Republicans are evil and sell their souls to corporations."  There is much anger toward corporations in the Politics subreddit.

I must say I was disappointed by the quality of the comments, but not entirely surprised.  I fully admit that my political bias runs against the predominating view in this subreddit, but the apparent lack of intelectual honesty and serious thought was disturbing to me.  Then again, the same could be said about most large group settings, so as previously stated I was not surprised.  Again, there were some thoughtful liberal postings, but they were the exception to the rule.  Interestingly, the few comments from conservative viewpoints were well structured, reasoned and clear.  I believe this is due to there being such a small number of conservative voices, so they feel they have to take care when posting if they want to generate any constructive debate.  I selected one such commenter at random and read through his past postings.  I read dozens of his comments, and with few exceptions they followed the same reasoned approach as the first.  Furthermore, this commenter almost exclusively stayed in the Politics subreddit (I only saw one post that could have been posted in a different area).  Perhaps the most revealing thing about these post was that out of the dozens of thoughtful posts I read, only three garnered a large amount of upvotes.  I am prepared  to make the following generalizations based on my research from this week:

• Comments will typically agree with previously posted comments
• The majority view in this subreddit thinks the worst of its opponents
• Dissenting arguments will typically be more thoughtful than the posts agreeing with the premise of the story
• Those arguments will largely be ignored

As for the rest of Reddit, here are a few miscellaneous observations I made this week:

• Many of the popular pictures posted to Reddit end up in picture galleries on other sites, suggesting that Reddit is the source
• Redditors will rally like-minded people to various causes (e.g. a posting in the Atheist subreddit asking readers to "crash" a poll on a Christian website)
• When Redditors post links to other sites, such as Youtube, it is not uncommon to find comments on the video that "Reddit gave my computer a virus."  (redditors claim these are fans of digg trying to scare people away)
• Reddit uses a "flasher" version of its mascot when a section has an age requirement

Finally, two things really stood out to me this week.  The first was a comic done by some guy in Paris detailing how he was chatting with some girl in Las Vegas via Chat Roulette (or some other random chat program, can't remember) and lost his internet connection just before he asked for her contact information.  After unsuccessfully trying to find her again on the chat program, he decided to post his plight on Reddit on the offchance that the girl was a reader.  I don't know if he was successful or not, but in any case it's certainly a fascinating use of the website.  The second was this awsome picture celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Legend of Zelda.  Nothing earth shattering from a technology standpoint, but still awesome.