An Open Letter to Reddit

Dear Reddit:

Much as I tried and failed to love my first girlfriend, I have tried to love you. I took you at your word, and trusted you to be a news aggregator. Maybe you really were an aggregator at some point, and maybe you will be again, but I’m not sure I’m willing to take that risk. It could be that you have become “FOX News for the Left” on accident, but I don’t think this is the case.

I realized today that underneath your simple exterior and closed-minded politics, you are nothing more than a private club. I can tolerate an open social network that happens to be like-minded, but a hive mind is too much for me to bear. If you don’t agree with this characterization, I ask you to look at what happens to stories from the other end of the political spectrum.

Normally, I would just stop coming by, but I think it is important the club realize what they are doing, and I would guess I am not alone in my concerns. Far left news stories are posted all day long, and pushed to the front page. The message is clear, Republicans are evil, George Bush is a dictator, Dick Cheney is the antichrist, and the United States is doomed if it does not elect Barack Obama. The problem is, instead of aggregating news, you have started filtering the news, and what is left behind paints a bleak picture of stolen elections, voter fraud, martial law, and unending financial crisis. You are breeding fear by not allowing participation from those with differing opinions that could moderate the debate.

You know as well as I do that fear is the enemy of reason. The biological systems that are enhanced by fear have little or nothing to do with one’s ability to think, though they often assist us in making the correct decision during times when our choice is binary. The problem is, fear often takes situations where the decision is not yes or no, or fight or flight and eliminates all our options until the problem seems binary.

A recent example is the rabble that grew from stories of imminent martial law. Those stories of course changed to martial law being used in November to steal the election, then morphed again into martial law being used by President Bush to hold authority after Barack Obama wins. In a matter of days you ran the full spectrum of fear – it’s happening now, it’s happening soon, it’s going to happen eventually. My concern is you stripped away the context. It is October in a presidential election year, and news stories of this kind are not a new invention.

Worse, just like FOX news you make no apologies for your fear mongering. There is no accountability. By the time a story is fully debunked, you have moved on to a new way that Republicans are going to destroy the United States. What happened to the horrible calamity on October 7^th? What happened to the imminent bombing of Iran? What happened to the New Great Depression? You can say they will happen eventually, but that is true of most things if the timeline is long enough. Where are the news stories that could mediate such fears by putting them in context? I thought the more liberal individuals in America were supposed to be the more intelligent and reasonable individuals. I thought liberals were open minded and believed in nuance.

When you do attempt to offer context, it is only context to further my fear. And when there is a day that doesn’t lend itself to trashing everyone who ever cast a ballot in a Republican Primary, you dig up stories about election fraud in Ohio four years ago. I know the report just came out, but if you were so worried about it, you could have read a book on the subject, instead of waiting until it aided your goal of agitating and unnerving liberals. Additionally, when you post a story that is nothing more than an interview sharing one person’s opinion, it isn’t actually news.

I understand that the other guys have been in charge for eight years, and that a lot of things have happened which give you cause to feel concern; however, if you look back to 2000, there was widespread panic among Republicans that President Clinton would not leave office. FOX News unearthed a scenario where he could keep his office in the case of a contested election, and pushed the idea that he most certainly would do so because Al Gore was his vice president.

You see, the bigger problem is filtering your media this way only hurts the participants. The reason Republicans have been acting so unhinged over the last two weeks is no different. They are afraid of what will happen in an Obama presidency, and they only get their news from special sources that filter out any conflicting opinions. In some cases, you do us a great disservice by not taking the next step and posting competing ideas. There are concepts of value in other’s opinions even when one does not agree. The men who wrote the United States’ Constitution did not agree on most anything while they worked on that document. They had heated debates, and felt disgusted with one another’s views, but they listened to each other, and the final result was stronger because of it.

Instead of agitating people about martial law, post stories that explain how martial law is a low percentage possibility, and explain what can be done. There are options besides fighting or fleeing in the event of President Bush completing his coup d’état. The easiest thing we can do is ensure we have enough food to last for a few months (provided we ration it), and some bottled water in case of service disruption. Should Martial Law be implemented, the most effective means to ending the action is a work stoppage. It will take a lot less than three months for corporate America to pressure the government into restoring some semblance of freedom, and that small amount of freedom allows us to organize and implement new plans to peacefully take back our country.

This is practical information that may actually be helpful in the event of disaster and that is why it would never end up on your front page. Someone posted a story that wasn’t pro-Obama, and the response was nearly immediate that it be pushed down into no man’s land where even the worst of your junkies could not find it – because your search feature sucks. (Yes, I know that google will allow me to do a site search, and I do so occasionally, but it seems odd that a solution to this problem be so unattainable). Worse than the negative voting system you use to keep people with differing opinions from joining the discussion, is the way you treat moderates who visit. One of the comments to a recent non-left story basically said “take it to free republic, we’re not stupid here.” When you react in this way, you lower the discourse to a significant degree, and do all of us a disservice.

Mostly, I just wanted you to know, that I have tried to love you, but it isn’t working out. No matter how much you try to cater to my viewpoints, I need third party information and opinion if I am to be an informed citizen. Maybe in the future, after the election is over and Bush is dethroned, we can hang out again, and see how it goes, but . . . I guess that what I am saying is we can still be friends, Reddit, but I want to see other aggregators.

Sincerely,

D.pH

P.S. Would you please quit acting like Ron Paul is the last honest politician and sole protector of the Constitution? It is annoying, and makes you look uninformed.