But the /r/atheism that everyone loves and loves to hate is no longer around, thanks to new rules implemented by moderators. And boy, are Redditors mad.

The long and twisted history of /r/atheism as a corner of the internet that somehow made became a hallmark of Reddit’s behavior (and misbehavior) is too long to recount with brevity, but the recent history is the most important: After years of acting as moderator, /r/atheism founder skeen was stripped of his title via an admin request and two new moderators, jij and tuber, acted in his stead.

The new rules they introduced earlier this week are specifically designed to curb down on image macros, silence users heading to the 2 million-strong forum to submit funny off-topic posts, and enforce strict measures on trolling. The overall intent was to bring /r/atheism back to the discussion of atheism.

But plenty of the godless redditors have turned on jij and tuber, calling for the two moderators to step down, to restore the “lawless” land of /r/atheism, and to just pipe down and let Redditors do what they want. The result is an out-and-out fight among those who side with mods, those who want freedom, and the trolls just fueling the conversation for kicks.

The battle at /r/atheism is important for Reddit — in fact, I would argue that the community at large needs it. Reddit has long spent its years on the Internet toeing the line between eye-opening discussion (journalists love it) and a gathering place for racism, debauchery (/r/deadjailbait) and general internet grossness. The fight between the Redditors asking for freedom and the mods looking to encourage thoughtful discussion on one of the biggest subreddits around will alter the way the website approaches the role of moderators and just how free the speech should be on a platform that is increasingly becoming the go-to place on the Internet.

The fate of /r/atheism will certainly unfold tomorrow morning, when jij and tuber will host an AMA to discuss what the community wants out of the subreddit. It’s bound to set precedent on how the hive mind of Redditors is best maintained, and whether we’ll be seeing more of Sheltering Suburban Mom on the front page anytime soon.

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The Hackathon caps off three days of digital publishing events at BEA. I’ve been here all week, covering topics like new trends in ebook pricing, the new ebook publishers and the biggest difference between book publishers and Amazon.

The event starts at 3 PM ET, and I’ll be live-blogging it here.

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Some of the commentary about Reddit and the bombings has made it seem as though all of Reddit was engaged in a massive “witch hunt” to find the identity of the suspects in Boston. But the reality is that other parts of Reddit were doing things that were much more valuable, and I think we shouldn’t lose sight of that. So here are a few things that I think Reddit got right:

• It collected verified information: There were multiple Reddit threads that did nothing but curate or aggregate information about the bombings, including links to police reports, news articles and other sources. These threads also helped collect photos and video clips of the Boston marathon that might have contained useful information — and asked anyone with that information to also send those photos and clips to the authorities.
• It helped people who wanted to help: A number of the threads early on in the aftermath contained lists of all the things that users could do if they wanted to assist not just the investigation but the people who had been injured — from links to Google’s Person Finder and the Red Cross help line to information on where to pick up bags left at the scene, or airlines who had changed their policies on cancelling flights as a result of the attacks.
• It helped to verify facts: In most of the information-gathering threads, there is real-time verification of the info occurring, as users challenge other users to prove their claims. It is almost identical to the discussion that occurs on a Wikipedia “talk” page, in which editors try to verify the information that is being posted to an entry. Multiple updates occur within minutes of each other, and each one is marked with the time and any edits that took place.

Is Reddit capable of journalism? Yes

Even Reddit itself posted a disclaimer on one of its threads that said it isn’t trying to be a media entity, and that what it does isn’t journalism. And the user who created the “Find Boston Bombers” sub-Reddit or thread told The Atlantic that he doesn’t think of it as journalism either, and that no one should ever rely on such threads as a source because there is so much conflicting information flying around. He also admitted that the attempt to identify the bombers from photos was “a disaster.”

So if even Reddit itself doesn’t claim to be producing journalism, why do I keep saying it is? Because I think Reddit and Twitter and other social tools are broadening the concept of journalism. Some, like my friend Raju Narisetti from News Corp., believe that we should call this kind of thing something else — like that horrible term “user-generated content” — and leave the term journalism for things that are produced by professionals who are held to standards (although some might question whether the New York Post fits that description).

@mathewi you should fear. Find a new definition for non-journalism and use it. Why call ugc, crowds as journalism. It isnt.—
Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) April 22, 2013

In a nutshell, I believe that journalism is being atomized — that is, broken down into its component parts. One of those is the news-gathering function, whether it’s from eyewitnesses or just on-the-ground observation. This part of journalism can and is being done by anyone, thanks to what Om has called the “democratization of distribution,” and it can be hugely valuable. And the verification function has also been outsourced, so that people like Eliot Higgins can play a key role in identifying Syria weapons without leaving their apartment.

Reddit may have failed badly in one specific thread, and that is unfortunate. But other parts of the site have and continue to perform valuable functions that I see as part of the broader landscape or ecosystem of networked journalism. Instead of focusing just on the downside of that community, we should be thinking about how to take advantage of it — how to turn a negative feedback loop into a positive one.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Shutterstock / wellphoto K

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Within hours of the explosions in Boston, members of the Reddit community had created a thread (or sub-Reddit) about the incident, in an attempt to identify potential suspects. Users posted photos that had been published online or submitted by onlookers and analyzed video clips, piecing together clues like a specific kind of zipper that was used on a backpack found at the scene. Eventually, two potential suspects were identified — including one who posted a message on Facebook about his innocence.

Plenty of mistakes to go around

After some more investigation and crowdsourced information gathering, users on the Reddit thread seemed more or less convinced that the two were not likely to be the actual bombers, and eventually declared them “cleared.” Meanwhile, the New York Post identified the same two people as potential suspects and published their photos on the front page (both suspects have now been identified — one was reportedly shot by police on Friday and as of mid-afternoon on Friday the other was said to be on the run).

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic wrote that the process taking place on Reddit amounted to “vigilantism,” and was reprehensible, and warned against encouraging untrained people to try and determine the validity of forensic evidence after such an event. But is what happened on Reddit so bad? And is it any worse than what the traditional media have done in similar situations? I’m not convinced.

Yes, users of Reddit made mistakes — plenty of them, including identifying the wrong person as a suspect a second time on Thursday after erroneous information emerged from police scanners and other sources, something which caused a considerable amount of grief for a young man’s family and led to an apology posted on Reddit by a moderator.

But it should be noted that CNN and the NY Post have made plenty of mistakes as well, something Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review doesn’t really mention in his post about how brilliant the traditional media was and how wrong Reddit has been. The larger point is that this isn’t an either/or situation — crowdsourcing is valuable, and has been valuable for journalism and will continue to be. This is admittedly not an example of it at its finest.

Remember when we didn’t think random people putting together an encyclopedia would ever work? And yet it has — in part because it has a lot more structure than Reddit or 4chan. And those sites would probably be a lot more useful in these cases if people spent more time thinking and less time typing. But that doesn’t negate the value they can provide. The idea of using the knowledge and resources of the crowd is the whole point behind Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s “open journalism,” and it is a force we need to figure out how to tame, not dismiss as irrelevant based on one incident.

Open journalism works better

Am I calling what Reddit has been doing since the Boston bombings journalism? Yes. It may not encompass the entirety of what we know as journalism, and it is clearly flawed, but it is certainly an important aspect of it — just as Eliot Higgins, an unemployed British accountant, is performing a valuable journalistic act (one that New York Times writer C.J. Chivers has recognized) in verifying smuggled weapons in Syria by watching hundreds of hours of YouTube videos every day, even though no one is paying him to do so.

Will Oremus at Slate makes a fairly persuasive argument that Reddit has in some cases been *more* responsible in its attempts to identify the individuals than some traditional sources, including the Post. This kind of crowdsourced fact-checking and verification of evidence has been going on for years — it’s just more mainstream now. And anyone looking for evidence of someone jumping the gun and encouraging vigilantism doesn’t have to look any further than CNN.

When I wrote recently about the benefits of having journalism occur out in the open, journalism teacher Steve Fox and others said I didn’t spend enough time on the need for verification, and maybe I didn’t, but I believe this also should be done out in the open. In fact, one of the benefits to doing so is the ability to have more eyes on the information at hand — thereby making it easier to filter out the noise and find the signal, or triangulate the truth. As Jay Rosen has said, journalism gets better the more people there are doing it. And that includes Reddit.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Eva Blue and Jan-Arief Purwanto

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At a paidContent Live session hosted by Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg, three media companies described a new breed of creators who are equally at ease with content and technology. This has led to the emergence of non-traditional media influencers such as comment communities at Reddit, and at Vox Media sites The Verge and SB Nation.

“In the day, if you wanted to create media, you had to start as an intern making coffee,” said Vox CEO Jim Bankoff, adding that now anyone with $100 can make a movie. He explained that this democratization of content creation has resulted, in some cases, of Vox hiring people on the basis of their comment contributions.

This has led to a culture of empowerment in which everyday people are as fluent in media as many traditional journalists. More and more, they are taking to public platforms to not just report, but to take part in the news.

Erik Martin, GM of Reddit, cited “random acts of pizza” — a community on the site that sends pizza as a gesture of support, most recently to emergency workers in Boston.

But does this new culture of public participation also has a dark side? Slate’s Weisberg pointed to Reddit’s current efforts to identify the Boston bomber, including posting a suspect’s photo on the site, as approaching vigilante justice.

“Reddit may be creating the next Richard Jewell,” said Weisberg, referring to a police officer who foiled an Atlanta Olympics bombing plot only to be falsely accused as a suspect in a traumatizing “trial by media.”

Martin said he regarded the role of Reddit employees as “groundskeepers” who helped discrete communities determine their own standards.

Dan Roth, a former Fortune editor who now oversees news on LinkedIn Today, offered a further example of how non-journalists are creating media. He described how executives like Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson are now writing regular columns in their own voices. While such contributions in traditional media typically amounted to no more than press releases, Roth said that readers’ ire at inauthenticity has forced even corporate executives to reevaluate how they write.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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Reddit wrote in a blog post that Pao has already been both a formal and informal advisor to the company for over a year, and has now decided to join full-time. In a statement in the post, Pao explained why she will be joining the social news community:

“I grew up in Maplewood, New Jersey, raised by enginerds on Star Wars, computers and books. I live in San Francisco, via New York City, Boston and Hong Kong. I’ve worked with dozens of tech companies, traveling to eleven countries on five continents, to help build a variety of consumer and business platform companies. My favorite subreddits are /r/IAmA and /r/pareidolia (I like people even when they’re not real). Being part of a community of people who care is inspiring and energizing. reddit has so much to offer so many people, and I’m excited to find partners to help make reddit even more awesome.”

Pao left Kleiner Perkins in October after filing a complaint against the firm for gender discrimination. As the Wall Street Journal reported in March, the case is not yet closed, and Kleiner Perkins has hired a prominent lawyer to defend the firm.

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Key highlights in this report include:

• For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

• Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

• Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

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The New York Times has written about one recent example of user-generated content gone bad: namely, a video clip of a baby pig “rescuing” a hapless baby goat who is trapped in the pond at a petting zoo. Within hours of the clip being posted to YouTube last fall and subsequently shared on Reddit, it had appeared on The Today Show, NBC’s Nightly News, Good Morning America and dozens of other channels — and why not? It was incredibly cute, and had a feel-good message of the kind that morning shows in particular enjoy.

Of course, the video turned out to be a clip from a new TV show, which the creators manufactured and then uploaded as a kind of viral-marketing ploy. Not only did the baby pig not “rescue” the baby goat, but the producers of the show had to spend hours building an underwater track to even get the pig anywhere near the animal — and in the end they had to use a trained pig, after the one they were originally planning to use showed no intention of going into the pond.

Does it matter whether these clips are real?

As the NYT piece notes, when NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams introduced the video clip, he said he “felt duty bound to share this” with the audience, and added that he didn’t know whether it was real or not. Is that enough of a disclaimer to absolve a media outlet of responsibility for figuring out whether something can be verified or not? Many would argue that it is not. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute compared it to “a form of malpractice” for journalists (McBride has more on that in a blog post about the incident at Poynter).

@mathewi No. Even though it may seem trivial because it's a pig video, it's embarrassing and adds to distrust of the media.

—
Liz Heron (@lheron) February 27, 2013

Obviously, part of what shows like Good Morning America do is pure entertainment — in other words, not journalism by any stretch. But clips like the baby goat rescue show up on programs like The Nightly News as well, and the hosts rarely say anything about whether a clip is real or not. In some cases, these videos come right after a news report about something serious. How are audiences to know when something is “just entertainment” and therefore hasn’t been checked?

In another recent incident, a video purporting to show a golden eagle snatching a small child from a park went “viral” on the social web and showed up on a number of media outlets. It too turned out to be fake — the creation of some hard-working students in a computer-generated imagery course at a school in Montreal. The students deliberately chose something that seemed almost believable, based on “urban legends” of such incidents in the past.

We need to be careful what we amplify

Interestingly enough, the clip was debunked within hours of being uploaded, by another young programmer with some expertise in computer-generated imaging (as well as by other outlets such as Gawker, which pointed out obvious signs others could have noticed). But as with many corrections in a digital age, it took longer for the truth to propagate than it did the original video — and many of the outlets that shared the original didn’t bother to update their audience with the facts.

Om wrote recently about how one of the key responsibilities of journalists in this new age of “democratized distribution” of information is to pay attention to what they choose to amplify and what they don’t, and incidents like the baby goat video bring that home with a vengeance.

If all a media outlet is doing is sharing the latest video from Reddit or a tweet from a celebrity, how is that adding anything meaningful to what viewers can get elsewhere? It isn’t. And if traditional media continue to imitate their online competitors like BuzzFeed or Reddit without adding anything of value, then they will likely find that audiences are happy to go to the original source of that content rather than relying on the TV news to find it for them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

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Photo: OnInnovation

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, took to Reddit and chatted about scores of issues. I found this one bit particularly interesting. While he might not preside over Microsoft like he once did, Gates is an astute observer of technology trends.

Robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at “computers”. Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways.

Of his other comments, I found this one pretty telling and it resonated with me:

If the microprocessor had NOT come along I am not sure what I would have done. Maybe medicine or theoretical math but it is hard to say.

And here is what he had to say about Steve Jobs:

He and I respected each other. Our biggest joint project
was the Mac where Microsoft had more people on the project than Apple did as we wrote a lot of applications. I saw Steve regularly over the years including spending an afternoon with him a few months before he tragically passed away.

Does he still code and if so in which language?

Not as much as I would like to. I write some C, C# and some Basic. I am surprised new languages have not made more progress in simplifying programming. It would be great if most high school kids were exposed to programming…

On a more macro topic, what needs changing in the world that money cannot help?

It would be nice if all governments were as rational as the Nordic governments – reaching compromise and providing services broadly. The Economist had a nice special section on this last week. Africa governments have often been weak but you can’t write a check to change that. Fortunately the average quality is going up. Mo Ibrahim tracks this in a great way. (
http://www.moibrahimfoundation.org/IIAG/
)

Which world-wide health cause could be solved with just a bit more in terms of attention and resources?

Polio is the first thing to get done since we are close. Within 6 years we will have the last case. After that we will go after malaria and measles. Malaria kills over 500,000 kids every year mostly in Africa and did not get enough attention until the last decade. We also need vaccines to prevent HIV and TB which are making progress…

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Now, though, the Huffington Post’s comment strategy suddenly makes a lot more sense in light of “Conversations,” a new tool that surfaces discrete discussions within the comment stream and then lets readers read those discussions on a separate webpage. In the case of the Hillary story, for instance, the first comments that appear at the bottom of the story will now be “conversations” sparked by popular members of the existing HuffPo community.

The new set-up should make it easier to jump in on a given debate about the story that’s of interest. In the Benghazi story, for example, groups of people can find each other to discuss specific facets of the story — whether the US should be in Libya; whether the incident was Hillary’s fault; whether Hillary is actually a Muslim agent sent from Mars to destroy America and so on.

The fact that the “Conversations” will now have their own URL also makes it easier for people to share them and invite others into the discussion. The feature in some ways resembles the buzzy start-up Branch which lets people grab existing conversations and continue them in new places (though, unlike Branch, HuffPo’s system is not invite-only). To get a better idea of what HuffPo is doing, here are two screenshots from a recent story. The first is an existing conversation (I’ve circled the button that takes it elsewhere) and the other is what the conversation looks like on the new URL:

Huffington Post CTO, John Pavley, explained in a phone interview that the site relies mostly on algorithms to parse comments and to identify worthy conversation leaders but that it uses human moderators too. HuffPo’s inspiration for its comment system comes in part from Reddit, the popular group-reading site, he added. (The move also comes that at a time that publishers led by Gawker’s Nick Denton are re-evaluating the philosophy of comments in general).

The share-a-conversation feature serves to make order out of the comment chaos, but could also turn into a serious money maker for the Huffington Post. According to Pavley, the company will use parent company AOL’s ad platform to serve up relevant ads next to the conversations. This is significant because the HuffPo will not only have more pages to monetize; it will also be able to offer advertisers the promise of “hyper-engaged readers.” This type of audience is being touted by companies like Disqus as extra valuable because readers are more likely to engage an ad if it’s next to a subject they’re passionate about — the idea is that, if they’re taking the time to comment, they presumably are engaged.

HuffPo is rolling out Conversations slowly and, for now, the feature is only appearing on the site’s World and Gay Voices sections. It will appear across the whole site soon.

(Image by siSSen via Shutterstock)

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