Visualization of the Reddit Network
Schöne Visualisierung des internen Netzwerks auf Reddit von sharkbait784, welche Sub-Reddits mit welchen am engsten verbunden sind und am häufigsten aufeinander verlinken. Schade, dass er die bekannten Subreddits per se rausgeschmissen hat und nicht optional zuschaltbar sind. Immer noch superinteressant und schön zu sehen, welche Sub-Netzwerke es dort gibt. Der Gnubbel rechts ist zum Beispiel das Perv-Network ausgehend von /r/nsfw.
I’ve produced a graph showing links between subreddits, where a link is defined as a redditor posting a link in one subreddit to another subreddit. This graph was based on data collected from public Reddit posts since 2008, kindly provided by Deimorz.
In order to identify the most interesting cliques, the following process was applied to the data (if you aren’t familiar with the nomenclature of graph theory, a “node” is a point on a graph (so one of the subreddits in this case), an “edge” is a link between two nodes and the “degree” of a node is the number of edges connected to it):
- Removed edges between subreddits that have less than eight occurrances.
- Removed nodes with a degree greater than 75 (this was enough to get rid of every sub in the top 20 subreddits (by subscriber). Since these subs are likely to link to a wide variety of topics, an association with one of these subs is not particularly interesting to us.
The Reddit network (via MeFi)
Tim Berners-Lee mourns Aaron Swartz
Ich hab’ heute einige Postings zu Aaron Swartz viel zu frühem Tod gelesen, aber dieses kurze Stück Hacker-Poetry von Tim Berners-Lee hat mir grade das Herz gebrochen.
Aaron is dead.
Wanderers in this crazy world,
we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.Hackers for right, we are one down,
we have lost one of our own.Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders,
parents all,
we have lost a child.Let us all weep.
timbl
Mehr:
Lawrence Lessig: Prosecutor as bully.
Cory Doctorows Nachruf auf Boing Boing
EFF: Farewell to Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist
My Aaron Swartz, whom I loved
NYTimes: Aaron Swartz, Precocious Programmer and Internet Activist, Dies at 26
Internet-Archive: Aaron Swartz, hero of the open world, dies
Gigaom: The web responds to the death of hacker-activist Aaron Swartz
Guardian: Death of internet activist Aaron Swartz prompts flood of Twitter tributes
[update] Rick Perlstein: Remembering Aaron Swartz: „we are all Aaron Swartz“:
I remember a creature who seemed at first almost to be made up of pure data, disembodied—a millionaire, I had to have guessed, given his early success building a company sold to Condé Nast, but one who seemed to live on other people’s couches. (Am I misremebering that someone told me he crashed in his apartment for a while, curling up to sleep under a sink?)
Only slowly, it seems, did he come to learn that he possessed a body. This is my favorite thing he wrote: about the day “I looked up and realized I couldn’t read the street sign. I definitely used to be able to read that sign, but there it was, big and bright and green along the highway, and all I could make out was a blur. I had gone blind.” Legally blind, it turned out; and then when he got contact lenses, he gave us an account of what it felt like to leave Plato’s cave: “I had no idea the world really looked like this, with such infinite clarity. It looks like a modernist photo or a hyperreal film, everything in focus everywhere. Everyone kept saying ‘oh, do you see the leaves now?’ but the first thing I saw was not the leaves but the people. People, individuated, each with brilliant faces and expressions at gaits, the sun streaming down upon them. I couldn’t help but smile. It’s much harder being a misanthrope when you can see people’s faces.”
This man is dead now.
Aaron Swartz, Co-Founder of Reddit, R.I.P.
Aaron Swartz, einer der Gründer von Reddit und Entwickler der RSS-Spezifikationen (mit 14!) und Internet-Aktivist, hat sich mit 26 Jahren das Leben genommen. Sad Day.
Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11, according to his uncle, Michael Wolf, in a comment to The Tech. Swartz was 26. […]
The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”
[update] Cory Doctorows Nachruf auf Boing Boing:
Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturber.
The post-Reddit era in Aaron’s life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he’d be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant.
[update] Lawrence Lessig: Prosecutor as bully.
Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.
Behind the Scenes of Obamas Reddit-AMA and 100 duck-sized Horses
Spannendes Posting auf (ausgerechnet!) Buzzfeed, ein Behind-The-Scenes von Barack Obamas digitaler Kampagne und seinem Reddit-AMA:
Within 24 hours, 5.2 million people had read the Reddit interview. It was the most-trafficked post in Reddit’s history. Just before signing off, Obama mentioned GottaRegister.com, the campaign’s official voter registration site, and 30,000 people registered to vote from that link. “And he didn’t even hyperlink the fucking thing, so they, like, actually copy-and-pasted it, and opened up a new tab, and put it in,” said a senior official.
Und:
The next night, Clint Eastwood opened up for Mitt Romney at the RNC. He talked to an empty chair. Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean ran into Jim Messina’s office: You’ve got to see this. Stop. What. You. Are. Doing. Two other Obama digital staffers—Jessi Langsen and Alex Wall—who were watching the feed came up to Goff and Joe Rospars within minutes. Another staffer had found a picture of the president pointing at a chair and asked, “Can we post this picture of the president?” Others were a little hesitant.
“I don’t know, guys. That feels a bit like we’re saying ‘fuck you,’ ” said one official. . . . “Clint Eastwood is superpopular.”
But then Langsen and Wall found a way of doing it that was like “Hey, fuck you” but not quite as blatant and with a little more style. Langsen came up with the caption: “This seat’s taken.” It became the most retweeted political missive to date, and a way to answer Eastwood without seeming “unpresidential.”
Und die wahrscheinlich wichtigste Frage aller Zeiten, die wohl leider unbeantwortet bleibt: „Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?“
Back in Chicago, the staff were examining the Reddit transcript. There was one question everyone on the team wished Obama had answered. Goff probably would have selected it, according to his colleagues, but he didn’t see it at the time. Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?
In the days following, staffers debated the answer. Most immediately chose the 100 duck-sized horses— they would be easy to stomp on and were, generally, a reflection of the usual day-to-day conflicts in life. A danger to the shins, but possibly manageable. “Ducks are not exactly teeny-tiny—so 100 duck-sized horses (as opposed to duckling-sized horses), while smaller than a miniature pony, are still probably clocking in somewhere around ten pounds each,” one Obama official argued. “That’s a lot to kick/throw/battle.”
Who would choose to fight a duck the size of a horse? The beak. The wingspan. The ability to defend and attack in the air, on land, and in the water. “Also, lacking a weapon of some kind, how exactly do you defeat it? Wrestling it to the ground seems unlikely. Can you break its legs? Snap a wing?” the official continued. “Yet, it’s just one opponent—you can focus all your energy, attention, and strength on outsmarting it. Maybe it tires easily. Hard to know.”
Most saved Reddit-Stuff:
Reddit hat sich ein neues Feature angeschafft, User mit Reddit-Gold können Kommentare und Postings speichern, jetzt haben sie die meistgesaveten Beiträge gepostet. Wirklich ziemlich interessantes Zeug dabei: WW1 Books, LennyBot, Zombie Jesus Pizza, Confronting Procrastination, and a Good Roux: the most saved comments and posts on reddit.
Predditor-Wars Update
Hier ein paar Updates zur Reddit vs Gawker-Story. Kurzfassung: Reddit sieht in der Sache immer beschissener aus und die „Free Speech“- und „Anonymity“-Argumentation wirkt zunehmend albern und unzutreffend. Sehr schade, dass die an sich wunderbare Plattform derzeit vor allem wegen ihrer Trolle und Arschlöcher wahrgenommen wird. ViolentAcrez wurde übrigens mittlerweile von seinem Job gefeuert, seine Krankenversicherung aufgelöst und nun könnte man vorschnell urteilen, dass das Leben des Mannes für absehbare Zeit erstmal zerstört wurde, weil wegen des Gawker-Postings. Wrong: Der Mann ist fertig, weil er ein – vielleicht sogar das größte! – mutmaßlich kriminelles Internet-Arschloch ist oder war und sich dann dabei erwischen ließ. That’s why.
Am treffendsten kommentiert den Unsinn wahrscheinlich Joel Johnson (Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Wired), der die Story mit der Pubertät vergleicht und der Internet-Gegenkultur verstärkten Ausfluss an Bullshit attestiert: Reddit’s *bildungsroman*.
Reddit won’t stop being Reddit by acknowledging that some content–like creepy, if technically legal photographs of minors, or the anonymity of the people taking or sharing those sorts of sleazy images–aren’t worth defending. It’s not a question of whether or not people should have a right to put those images online. It’s a question of whether or not Reddit wants to be the home for that sort of behavior.
Reddit mistakes itself as wholly representative of the internet. (A mistake compounded, for good and for ill, by its founders.) By any measure, it is not. Or is not fully. The internet is by and for everyone. The internet is even for people you may not agree with. And if the Reddit community–or its official, paid employees–decide that they want to take a stand for free (even if sleazy) expression as a reflection of the ideals they think represent the internet–and probably do!–they should also accept a more objective, nuanced, and inclusive view not just of the self-defined outcast community they have built together, but for the actual internet at large. Which means taking their lumps when another part of the internet–Gawker, in this case–criticizes them, discussing the matter among their own community, instead of sticking their fingers in their ears and attempting to draw yet another line between themselves and the people who write a site like Gawker, a site that is more akin to Reddit in taste and demeanor than most Redditors seem to be aware.
Guardian: Reddit wants free speech – as long as it agrees with the speaker: „Reddit’s new stance appears to be that free speech is great – as long it’s speech it agrees with. Which is a position the RIAA (which seeks to close sites linking to pirate content), or even China’s Communist party could happily agree with.“
The Atlantic: The Only Thing Redditors Have to Fear Is Reddit Itself: „Reading the drama from the outside, you couldn’t help imagine that you were peering into the Gchat of one of the nonvolunteer stars of Creepshots trying to figure out how to keep the information from spreading: “Deleting things that link to bad links is not sustainable,” wrote one site admin. In other words: redditors got reddited and there is nothing Reddit can do about it. Redditors don’t like that.“
The Verge: Reddit user banned, then restored, as mods struggle with stories critical of the site: „CivAndTrees said that the site is being ‘infested’ by overreaching moderators. ‘It’s really sad. But being banned from r/technology like that for a simple post really disturbs me. Reddit is getting bigger and bigger, and it seems some people are trying to control what is seen and not seen on this website’“
Boing Boing: Violentacrez exposé should be taken on its own merits: „Who can, hand on heart, prefer the “honest depravity” of a prolific victimizer of the weak over the “hypocritical” journalism that exposes him? It’s an entirely too abstract–and too privileged–viewpoint.“
Techdirt: Reddit, Trolling, Doxxing, Free Speech & Anonymity: Whoo Boy, Is This Stuff Complicated: „A giant conversation has been started and (almost) none of it has involved getting the law involved to step in and decide who is bad and who is good. Instead, in occasionally messy ways, the community is working out its own norms, and that’s fascinating to watch.“
Gawker vs Reddit: The Predditor-Wars
Seit gestern fetzen sich Reddit und Gawker, Anlass ist einerseits ein (erst gelöschtes, dann wieder hergestelltes und mittlerweile passwortgeschütztes) Tumblr namens Predditors, auf dem Userinnen andere Redditors outen (mit Daten, die öffentlich zugänglich sind), die Bilder von jungen Damen auf Subreddits wie /r/Creepshots posten oder schlicht misogyne Arschlöcher sind. Gawker hatte außerdem angekündigt, den „Cheftroll“ von Reddit zu outen, „Violentacrez“, der sich selbst auch „Uncle Creepy“ nennt und u.a. das mittlerweile gelöschte Pädo-Subreddit /r/Jailbait gründete und in einem AskMeAnything-Interview damit angab, mit seiner 19jährigen Stieftochter Oralverkehr zu haben. Aufgrund der Ankündigung des Artikels zensieren viele prominente Rubreddits mittlerweile Links zum Gawker-Network und Gawker hat den Artikel heute mittag veröffentlicht: Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez, The Biggest Troll on the Web.
Judging from his internet footprint, Brutsch, 49, has a lot to sweat over. If you are capable of being offended, Brutsch has almost certainly done something that would offend you, then did his best to rub your face in it. His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls, but as Violentacrez he also issued an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations yet unnamed, all on the sprawling online community Reddit. At the time I called Brutsch, his latest project was moderating a new section of Reddit where users posted covert photos they had taken of women in public, usually close-ups of their asses or breasts, for a voyeuristic sexual thrill. It was called “Creepshots.” Now Brutsch was the one feeling exposed and it didn’t suit him very well.
But Michael Brutsch is more than a monster. Online, Violentacrez has been one of Reddit’s most reviled characters but also one of its most beloved users. The self-described “creepy uncle of Reddit” has played a little-known but crucial role in Reddit’s development into the online juggernaut it is today. In real life, Brutsch is a military father and cat-lover. He lives with his wife in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, Texas. There are many sides to Violentacrez, and now that I had Michael Brutsch on the phone I hoped to find out where the troll ended and the real person began.
Bei aller Liebe zu Reddit und trotz meiner Verachtung für die klickgeilen Gawker-Websites: Reddit sieht in dieser Sache nicht gut aus. Wer Arschlöchern ein Forum bietet, muss sich nicht wundern, wenn man anfängt zu stinken. Und trotz allem Verständnis für Reddits „Everything goes“-Policy und der nahezu kompletten Auslagerung der Moderation an die Community („forum moderators could ban all posts that start with ‘g’ if they wanted to“) wäre hier eine klare Ansage angebracht.
SubredditDramas hat die ganze Story: [Recap]The Great Dox of 2012 or DOXGATE: a recap of this week’s doxxing of violentacrez and r/CreepShots users, Part I – violentacrez und [Recap]The Great Dox of 2012 or DOXGATE: a recap of this week’s doxxing of violentacrez and r/CreepShots users, Part II – CreepShots.
Mehr:
Buzzfeed: Reddit General Manager Explains Why He Won’t Ban Creepy
The Atlantic: Redditors Stand Up to Gawker to Protect Child Pornography
Washington Post: Reddit, Gawker, Jezebel and the Predditors war
Forbes: Internet Wars Over Women’s Bodies
Reddit in the Year 3000
Schönes Ding von Redditor Gonzoblair: Screenshot of reddit from the year 3012. Die Ghost-Story mit Bill Murray oben basiert übrigens auf einer Bill Murray Urban Legend, zu der er mal in einem Interview befragt wurde. Is’ natürlich nicht mit der Wahrheit rausgerückt: „It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Just so crazy and unlikely and unusual?“ (Danke Gilly!)
Obama on Reddit: Ask me anything!:
Obama beantwortete seit einer Stunde vor einer Stunde Fragen auf Reddit. Dürfte das bislang größte Event für Reddit werden und das Ding ist natürlich Teil seines Wahlkampfs und dementsprechend zu lesen (mal abgesehen davon, dass Reddit seitdem eh nur noch schwer zu erreichen ist). Aber dennoch: Schöner Move. (Danke Bjørne!)
[update] Von The Verge: Reddit has its biggest day ever thanks to President Obama’s AMA: „The post set a record for Reddit, with more than 200,000 concurrent visitors during the iAMA. That makes today Reddit’s biggest day ever, general manager Erik Martin told The Verge over Gchat. “Chaos here,” he said.“
How Reddit Got Obama: “There Are Quite a Few Redditors at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”
How Reddit grew on Fake-Accounts
Youtube Direktreddit, via /.
Dass Reddit beim Start jede Menge Fake-Accounts eröffneten und so eine größere Userzahl vorgaukelten, wusste ich. Im Video oben erklärt Reddit-Gründer Steve Huffman im Detail, wie sie’s gemacht haben. Das Geheimnis war ein zusätzliches Submit-Feld für Admins, in dem man einen Usernamen eingeben konnte, der automatisch angelegt wurde.
Huffman said that using fake accounts driven by the founders was key to building the tone they wanted to the site. Basically, by populating the site with accounts whose strings they pulled, the Reddit crew could shape the discourse and sharing of the site in the direction they wanted, and as the real user base grew, those standards held, allowing the fake accounts to fade away.
It’s fascinating that such a massive user base could be seeded by a few guys with a whole bunch of avatars. It’s an incredible example of the Internet’s power to magnify one’s own voice.
I am Gus Fring. Ask me anything.
Giancarlo Esposito aka „Gus Fring“ spielte in den Staffeln zwei bis vier von Breaking Bad wahrscheinlich die interessante Figur gespielt, die in den letzten Jahren im Fernsehen zu sehen war. Jetzt hat er auf Reddit ein paar Fragen beantwortet, teilweise per Video. Alle Clips gibt’s in seinem Youtube-Channel, hier erklärt er, was er vom Set der Serie hat mitgehen lassen:
I am Giancarlo Esposito. I’ve had a few people tell me reddit would be a great place to have a discussion with fans. And what does a man do? A man provides. I’ve played many roles over the years. You might know me from Breaking Bad, where I play Gus Fring.
I’ll begin answering questions here at 2:30pm EST. I’ll answer as many questions as I can get to in the discussion. (no spoilers in the questions please!) Also, for a few of your questions where I have longer / interesting stories, I’ll also be posting videos with my answer to my YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/digitalforhumans with a video response.
Hier noch noch zwei Videos, die er nach der AMA-Session als Bonus dazugepackt hat: Gus’s Relationships with Jesse, Mike, and Gale und Easter Eggs and Working with Vince Gilligan.
I am actor Giancarlo Esposito, and I play Gus on the show Breaking Bad. AMA. (via Boing Boing)
Neil deGrasse Tyson AMA on Reddit (again)
Neil deGrasse Tyson beantwortet seit einer Stunde zum zweiten Mal Fragen auf Reddit. Ich hab’ grade bisschen zu tun, werde dann aber die spannendsten Antworten hier als Update posten – die erste geht aber schonmal gut los:
Q: If a space traveling entity approached you with an opportunity to visit any celestial object from any distance and allow you bring one scientific instrument of your choosing, where would you go and what would you bring? The size of the instrument does not matter, but keep in mind the farther away your object of choice is, the more it may have changed (i.e. if you hoped to visit the recently discovered supernova SN 2011fe, you would arrive 21 million years after the event).
A: I’d bring my iPhone, as the most compact representation of modern culture there is. And I’d visit a civilization on a galaxy 65 million light years away. Assuming I can get there instantaneously, I would look back to Earth with their presumably super telescopes and witness the extinction of the dinosaurs – the light of which is just now reach them.
[update] My brain hurts:
Q: Hey Neil, can you somehow try to to make it a little easier to grasp the concept of infinity. best wishes from Germany!
A: No. The human mind, forged on the plains of Africa in search of food, sex, and shelter, is helpless in the face of infinity.
Therein is the barrier to learning calculus for most people — where infinities pop up often. The best you can do is simply grow accustomed to the concept. Which is not the same as understanding it.
And when you are ready, consider that some infinities are larger than others. For example, there are more fractions than there are counting numbers, yet they are both infinite. Just a thought to delay your sleep this evening.
I am Neil deGrasse Tyson — AMA (via Nils @Twitter)
Vorher auf Nerdcore:
Neil deGrasse Tyson AMA on Reddit
Neil deGrasse Tyson AMA on Reddit
Astrophysiker Neil deGrasse Tyson hat gestern abend auf Reddit Fragen der User beantwortet und alles davon ist Science-Gold, die erste Antwort ist aber nochmal Doppelgold: „If you could add one course to a student’s curriculum, what would it be? – Course title every university should offer: ‘How to tell when someone else is full of shit’“. Meine wahre Lieblingsantwort ist dann allerdings die hier:
If you could impress one thing on young people today, what would it be?
That adults are not all they’re cracked up to be. And most of them are wrong most of the time. This can be quite revelatory for a kid – often launching them on a personal quest of exploration, rather than of Q&A sessions with their parents.
I am Neil deGrasse Tyson — AMA (Bild: After reading Neil Degrasse Tyson’s AMA, I just had to do it.)
Und: Letzte Woche gab’s auch einen neuen Clip von Symphony of Science mit dem Herrn, hab’ ich aber nicht gebracht, weil… ich kann den Scheiß nicht mehr hören. Aber da’s grade mehr als wunderbar reinpasst, hier: Symphony of Science – Onward to the Edge!
Bielefeld-Conspiracy in Comparison:
Reddit hat vor ein paar Stunden gelernt, dass „German internet users have a 17-year-old meme where they pretend the town of Bielefeld (330,000) does not exist“. Der englischsprachige Artikel auf Wikipedia zum Thema ist länger als der deutschsprachige. Nuff said.
