How Online Popularity Contests Are Killing Politics
Luddite? Not me.
I like tech.
Played Pong, loved Space Invaders. Was obsessed with the TRS-80, Commodore 64 and Apple II. One of my first jobs, as a traffic engineer for an Ohio suburb, had me programming a Honeywell 77 computer the size of a small car; I loved those crazy punchcards (“do not fold, spindle or mutilate”), FORTRAN and the green glow of the LED terminal.
I was among the first cartoonists to put my email address on my work; I loved the instant audience feedback. Still do. So I blog and I’ve embraced social networking. I tweet. I post to Facebook. And Google Plus, though I’m not sure why. LinkedIn has the dumbest business model ever–in the middle of a Depression, it’s where jobseekers meet nonexistent would-be employers—but I use it anyway (to connect to other underemployed losers).
So. Note to people who are reading this online: I’m one of you.
Anyway, when a friend told me I should post my cartoons and columns to Reddit, I did.
Reddit, which was owned by the Condé Nast media conglomerate from 2006 to 2011 and is now its sister company, is a bulletin board whose registered users (“redditors”) post items to various categories (“reddits”): links, images, thoughts, whatever. As these entries appear, redditors can “upvote” or “downvote” them. Each reddit has a front page where posts with the highest net number of votes (upvotes minus downvotes) appear first.
“Officially, votes are intended to indicate importance and relevance to the topic, and not popularity (i.e., a Downvote is not a Dislike, it merely indicates that the redditor thinks that the submission is not worthy of making it to the front page,” according to Wikipedia. From Reddit’s FAQ: “Well written [sic] and interesting content can be worthwhile, even if you disagree with it…If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it.”
Nice theory.
Like capitalism, it doesn’t work so well in the real virtual world.
First I posted under my name. There’s no rule against it, but it turns out Redditors dislike self-promotion.
So I created an anonymous handle.
Here’s the thing: What makes the top listings at Reddit is usually dumb. Really really dumb. Rock-bottom low-brow. Stoopid.
As I write this, here are the top three:
No matter how old I get, I will always put my fingers in these (A link to a photo of rolls of Christmas wrapping paper in a store, with the shrinkwrapping punctured on each.)
So I went diving with sharks recently but this guy couldn’t help but smile for the camera (A link to a photo of a shark that appears to be smiling.)
Malicious Advice Mallard on marriage (A link to a “meme,” a joke photo of a duck with the caption “Marriage failing? Have a baby that will fix it.”)
This is a typical mix: Fluff, fluff, fluff. Yeah, I’m biased. Whatever; I think my stuff deserves as much play as a photo of a smirky elongate elasmobranch. Thus my fake handle.
The good news is that hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Reddit readers follow the links to each of my cartoons and columns.
Then an interesting pattern occurs.
There’s an initial flurry of upposts. The item climbs. Then there’s a flood of downposts.
This mirrors what I’ve seen elsewhere online. Left or right, political content often gets an initial burst of positive responses posted by people who agree with its point of view. Popularity-based metrics like Reddit’s bring the item to wider attention, which includes people who disagree with it. Who then vote it back down.
Usually to zero.
I’ve seen the same phenomenon on other sites but it’s particularly pronounced on Reddit because of its upvote/downvote scheme. I’ll watch my cartoon soar through upvotes only to come crashing down to zero as the downvotes come in.
It’s not just my stuff. Most content with a strong political point of view gets crushed by downvoters who evidently don’t know or care about Reddit’s “vote it up if it’s interesting, even if you disagree with it” admonition. The result: political content is vanishing down the cyber memory hole. It’s still there—if you can find it. But most people won’t bother. They’ll go to Reddit’s main page, click on the funny animal photos, and leave.
It’s not just the specific political content that’s disappearing. It’s the idea of politics itself. When politics isn’t part of the dialogue online, the idea that we can and should argue about the laws and ideas that govern our society disappears from our national consciousness. People simply stop thinking about it. Those who remember to look for political content take note of the disappearance of politics and draw the conclusion that they are alone, that politics aren’t popular. If you like politics but no one you know does, you probably won’t bug others with the subject. Soon the subject starts to fade from your own brain.
What’s crazy is, politics are popular. Reddit readers read my political cartoons. They vote them up. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at Reddit.
Should you care?
As the crisis of print media continues to shrink mainstream reporting, analysis and opinion, sites like Reddit are supposedly poised to step in to fill the void. A clunky transition is inevitable.
The problem is, Michael Barthel wrote in Salon, too many online consumers and gatekeepers think they’re already awesome: “One of the weirdest things about the Web is its eagerness to obsessively criticize every other form of media except the Web itself. Traditional journalism is dying, and it’s just a matter of time before the Internet figures out a new and improved form that will make everything perfect forever,” Michael Barthel wrote in Salon in July.
Barthel was criticizing “citizen journalism.” But his web skepticism can also apply to social media’s unwitting contribution to depoliticization: “The Web seems neutral, because it is an open platform that anyone can use. But just because anyone can does not mean everyone does. The stories that get covered are the ones citizen journalists care about most, and these citizen journalists tend toward a certain social-cultural-economic orientation.”
The Internet is exciting. Old media is stodgy. But democracy will suffer unless the Web gets better at politics.
Thanks to the social-cultural-economic orientation of too many Redditors, it’s the Malicious Advice Mallard’s world. We only live in it.
Not that you can see us on Reddit.
(Ted Rall’s website is tedrall.com. The author of “The Book of Obama: How We Went From Hope and Change to the Age of Revolt,” he is working on a new book about the war in Afghanistan to be released in Fall 2013 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)
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RALL 12/5/12
8 Comments.
Here is a slightly more cynical theory:
One can buy 10,000 twitter followers for like 99 ¢ these days. Something easily managed with a simple program written in any number of popular programming languages (all easier to work with then Fortran or the punchcards with which you are already familiar). Presumably for a similar price (as it would require a similar infrastructure and thus similar setup, overhead, and profit margin ect…) one could do the same thing with Reddit up and down votes or anything like it. It would be very easy and cheep to use such methods to literally blow anything of any even remote intelligence or significance out of the upvote “sky” the second it got off the ground on Reddit using a mechanism like that.
I hate to be thought of as a conspiracy theorist, but when the entire proposed shadow operation and infrastructure that it would require has already been demonstrated in a slightly different venue and costs a mere 99¢ per use it actually becomes harder for me to believe that the powers that be wouldn’t do it then it is for me to believe that they would. Essentially one would have to be a pretty sad and incompetent overlord not to spend 99¢ to keep the masses fat, dumb, and happy when one is already spending a well documented tens of billions of dollars on more subtle and elaborate forms of propaganda and misdirection.
Of course, maybe you are right, people on average are just dumb and simple. If one thing can be said to be true it is that the denizens of the internet, on average, can never be fully underestimated.
Ted, there’s a good, old fashioned word for this phenomenon. And that word is “censorship”. It’s the reason why #occupywallstreet never trended on Twitter back in September and October of 2011 when it should have.
Of course, the problem is the lack of proof. But if the so-called Green Revolution back in Iran trended quite nicely on Twitter when it was happening, then Occupy should have trended as well. It was all over the news.
The beauty of this system is that it’s hard to detect, and it makes those whose political views differ from that of the State look like “losers”. Far more effective than any Stalinist regime could even think up in their dreams.
Wow, two (now technically three) posts on the Rall blog in a row that are in perfect agreement. Where are the decenters and contrarians? Is it a holiday?
“Censorship is the reason why #occupywallstreet never trended on Twitter back in September and October of 2011 when it should have.”
Jesus Effing Christ, are you serious? You can’t be. That MUST be satire. If not let me clue you, and Ted, in:
Occupy was a TOTAL FUCKING FAILURE. Period. End. Of. Story.
There’s a reason for that, and it’s the same reason Ted is having such a hard time maintaining visibility on a shitty site like reddit. Here’s the big secret reason ….
People are fucking imbeciles. People are fucking idiots, morons, sub-80 IQ morons who don’t give a shot about anything other than …. cheeseburgers, NASCAR, beer, American Idol, getting pussy, getting cock, cool cars, cool clothes, being “hot”, being in the world of “hot”, looking good and being stupid.
Maybe neither of you got the memo, but there it is.
Now, I ask you: You expect to have a meaningful movement in this country … how exactly? Based on what exactly? Consumerism? The Big Gimme? More, more, more? Well, good luck with that. You’ll need it. The average American doesn’t even read books … ever! Tell me how you plan to explain that we need to organize a movement that will reshape how we govern ourselves when 90% of these shit-for-brains can’t even name the three branches of the government?
Occupy failed, exactly as I said it would. Ted was talking about the election not even happening! Then, with massive amounts of egg shit on his face, he wrote about the Occupy NEXT TIME!! LOL!! Fucking LOL LOL LOL!! Next time, he said! As if, by some magic, these same stupid brain-dead pieces of ignorant shit will become wise and sage!
God bless you and Ted! Your idealism is cute and somehow, not cute at the same time. One can only take so much self-deluded blather before it becomes offensively ignorant.
“Occupy was a TOTAL FUCKING FAILURE. Period. End. Of. Story.”
Yeah, and that’s because it was censored. A movement can’t get off the ground if nobody knows anything about it.
If Occupy was still camped out in the park that in itself would have been a failure.
It migrated into the Chicago Teacher’s strike, a success.
Occupy Sandy is still functioning. More successful than FEMA.
Workers have become emboldened in the face of their reactionary masters and are having more strikes.
And people are learning that the “Party of the People” hates the people who expect it to act the way it promotes itself.
Compare this to all of the other failures from the sixties.
The anti-war movement ended the draft but new wars in Central America started again under Carter a scant couple of years later.
Blacks are more impoverished today after the civil rights movement’s decapitation by the state.
Murderous violence by the state always comes back after the setbacks to it brought by public appeals to morality.
Identity politics has Blacks, women, and gays in positions of power supporting the failed ( failed from the perspective of the people outside of the 1%) economic system. A failure.
The system will continue to react to efforts of emancipation by the many. But things keep on changing and so does the game.
Hi Ted,
I feel as though I have been rude in coming to your site and not mentioning how much I like this particular column. The social dynamic analysis is terrific.
Please consider my appreciation mentioned.
Most of the examples of what we’ve had in this country have not been “people’s” movements. They’ve been the movements of power and authority and wealth from one small group to another. Power almost never flows down to the people. Three exceptions? The Civil Rights Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, and the Unions in the beginning of the 20th century.
In each case, the group in question had a specific goal, and their activities were aimed at achieving that goal. The unions wanted workers to have safe jobs with liveable wages and benefits. They wanted the factories to stop being at-will workhouses where people were thrown away like Kleenex. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory (where the fire started) charged the workers for sewing needles, electricity, and mistakes. Can you imagine that? It used to be simple business practice.
Look at OWS. I did. I looked very carefully. I saw a bunch of noobs waiting to be pwned. Why? For the same reason that Ted sees that good material gets swept away on the Internet. Leadership fills the role editors used to fill. Good ones FILTER. A good leader filters out all the dumb ideas and takes an idea that might work. A good editor leaves the stories about gift-wrap cellophane and runs the stories about police brutality. You cannot have a mass of people all just milling around and expect them to achieve any change. A small group must arise, devise methods to effect change, and then implement that strategy using tactics that sway more and more people to the group’s purpose.
You don’t do that with facebook updates.