I love social media and, so far, everything about it. In fact, my dream job would be a position dealing solely with social media; however, I feel that a piece of the social media that I love so much has betrayed me recently.
Before I can accurately describe this “betrayal,” it is important to understand what Reddit is. If you’ve also been living under a proverbial rock and haven’t heard much about Reddit, here’s what you need to know conveniently stated by Mashable:
Simply put, Reddit is a message board wherein users submit links. What differentiates it from a real-time information network like Twitter is that the stream of content is curated by the community. Items of value are ‘upvoted,’ and those deemed unworthy are ‘downvoted.’ This determines a posts’s position on the site, and items that hit the front page are seen by hundreds of thousands of people…
On a side-note, here’s a pretty cool PBS video that describes the culture of Reddit. It’s worth a watch too (after you’ve read this post, of course).
Now that you are fully updated with the workings of Reddit, I can explain the treachery that was afoot.
Recently, my family had some updated photos taken which, of course, were posted to the NAK Photography‘s website and to Facebook. The picture above was posted to Reddit and over the course of a few short hours was the number five photo post on Reddit. When I initially saw this, my love for social media took over and I thought it was really cool that my family’s picture was so popular.
However, my view changed when I started reading the comments. I know that the world wide web can be an extremely judgmental place and due to the lack of face-to-face interaction, people will write things that they wouldn’t otherwise say unless there was an internet barrier. (Which is an interesting communication phenomenon in itself, but that’s an entirely different post.) I wish I had thought to take some screen shots of some of the comments. I thought that my family picture was an innocent, yet funny representation of my family but the internet community felt differently.
In the end, I was able to contact the person who posted our photo to take it down because I didn’t want the negativity to be what made that photo viral; however, despite my best efforts, the photo showed up on various other websites with equally as disturbing comments but I digress.
Things I learned from this experience:
- Be careful what you post online because you never know what people who you don’t know might say about it.
- Reddit can be a cool social media tool.
- Be conscious of what you say about someone’s photo or blog or whatever because that family, or child, etc., might actually exist somewhere.
What are your thoughts about Reddit?
Cris Swaters 