Ethnography Results, Week 4

Karma... I must have it...

Anyways, in week 4, I continued my monitoring of the Politics subreddit (hereafter known as /r/politics).  As before, I found that I could predict most of the content and discussions they provoked, and once again the protests in Wisconsin were a major topic of discussion.

Summary of /r/politics from 2/22 to 3/1

However, there were a couple of notable differences from previous weeks.  The first involved a situation where a conservitive response to a liberal one was being buried in downvotes, causing it to no longer appear by default in the discussion.  That changed when the original poster, the liberal, edited his comment to ask what people thought they were doing.  He came to the defense of the buried poster, advocating that reddit was a place to share ideas, and that the downvote should be reserved for posts that do nothing to further a discussion instead of posts that contain a contrary opinion.  The comment subsequently got enough upvotes to become visible again, and the conservative expressed his grattitude to his defender.

The second notable difference was seeing people called out for posting stories that were either false or presented in such a way that the truth was obscured at best.  For example, a story was posted claiming that Canadian PM Stephen Harper had been thwarted in an attempt to pass legislation that would overturn a Canadian law that prevents news broadcasts from lying.  Soon after being posted, a comment explained that this was a totally inaccurate characterization, as the legislation had been proposed ten years ago by a Holocaust denier and had nothing to do with Harper.  Furthermore, the only reason it finally came to a vote was that the comittee in charge of it had run out of stalling tactics, as it never wanted to deal with it in the first place.  These examples of intellectual honesty have made me hopeful that constructive debate is more possible than what my first impression suggested, and I look forward to seeing what the next week holds. 

To comment on the culture of reddit as a whole, it seems that karma is one of the reasons people get as involved as they do.  People get karma when they receive upvotes, so high karma represents doing good in reddit.  According to the FAQ, high karma is like a high score in a videogame.  It has meaning for the person that gets it, but has no practical purpose.  Still, after gettiing some karma myself, I can see the appeal.  Wish me luck this next week, as I may fall into the karma trap and be lost to the world forever.  Or just spend too much time on reddit.