Once you understand how central Reddit is to BuzzFeed, it’s like spotting the wizard behind the curtain. Whenever you see a popular BuzzFeed post, search Reddit, and all will be revealed.
![Reddit is killing SOPA.
The Hill:
Members of Congress and their staff have grown used to scouring the Web, Twitter and Facebook to see where voters stand before finalizing their positions. But the heated debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has turned the social news website Reddit into an unlikely rallying point for opponents of the bill.
“[SOPA] would kill Reddit,” Reddit general manager Erik Martin told The Hill. “We’re a platform so normally we would not take a stand on any political issue but this one would end our ability to run the site.”
The website where users submit and vote for links has a proven track record launching online memes and viral videos, but the specter of SOPA has turned the community’s attention squarely toward Washington. The results have been eye-opening for Washington and Silicon Valley alike.
SOPA would empower the government and copyright holders to obtain court orders forcing search engines, domain name registrars and other Web firms to sever ties with foreign websites deemed rogue. The bill has strong support from the content industries, which argue foreign piracy is sapping revenue and costing the nation jobs.
“This definitely the first time we’ve seen something like this, that’s been written about in the national headlines daily,” Martin said. “Reddit was much smaller [in 2008], a different animal.”
(Image courtesy of Darel Parker)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lx56lovtX31qfengno1_1280.jpg)
Reddit is killing SOPA.
Members of Congress and their staff have grown used to scouring the Web, Twitter and Facebook to see where voters stand before finalizing their positions. But the heated debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has turned the social news website Reddit into an unlikely rallying point for opponents of the bill.
“[SOPA] would kill Reddit,” Reddit general manager Erik Martin told The Hill. “We’re a platform so normally we would not take a stand on any political issue but this one would end our ability to run the site.”
The website where users submit and vote for links has a proven track record launching online memes and viral videos, but the specter of SOPA has turned the community’s attention squarely toward Washington. The results have been eye-opening for Washington and Silicon Valley alike.
SOPA would empower the government and copyright holders to obtain court orders forcing search engines, domain name registrars and other Web firms to sever ties with foreign websites deemed rogue. The bill has strong support from the content industries, which argue foreign piracy is sapping revenue and costing the nation jobs.
“This definitely the first time we’ve seen something like this, that’s been written about in the national headlines daily,” Martin said. “Reddit was much smaller [in 2008], a different animal.”
Reddit’s political subreddit bans Tumblr
This was the response to my attempt to submit a Tumblr post to /r/politics — no Tumblr allowed.
That subreddit is getting more freakin’ useless as time goes on. It’s become a hotbed of censorship. I’ve been a redditor for five years and I’m done submitting to it.
Fuck ‘em.
News Roundup for 8/31/11
Bitter rivalry
-Headline of the Day-
“Sarah Palin Appearance at Tea Party Rally in Iowa ‘No Longer Confirmed.’”
There was going to be a big tea party rally in Iowa Saturday. Or maybe there isn’t. Who even knows?
See, here’s what happened: Sarah Palin was going to show up for this thing, but then she found out Christine O’Donnell was going to be there too. Christine’s selling this big important book nobody wants, so she’s like all over the place lately. So Sarah sees that Christine’s on the bill and she’s all like, “No way! She’s younger and prettier and — let’s face it — crazier than I am! No way am I going to get upstaged by that witch!”
Which is totally unfair, because Christine is famously not a witch.
Anyway the ‘baggers had to boot Christine or Sarah wasn’t going to show. That was final. So they did. Or maybe they didn’t. It’s all very confusing. Sarah’s saying that the organizers have lied to her. I guess she found out that Christine was going to pop out of a cake and surprise everyone with sparklers or something while Sarah did her big dance routine. I’m guessing. I don’t have the details. Just piecing stuff together from the info I have, like Sherlock Holmes.
Of course, Sarah cancelled. And then she didn’t cancel. And then her appearance was “on hold.” She might even throw together a different shindig someplace else just to show up that snotty little witch. Who knows? It’s all very indefinite and up in the air and crazy right now. And the ‘bagger group, Tea Party of America, is already out $100,000 whether anything happens or not.
You know, it’s organizational skills like this that got us the S&P downgrade. These people couldn’t put together a peanut butter sandwich without incurring a death toll. (Wall Street Journal)
-Doh!-
GOP frontrunners as characters from The Simpsons. 
Click to embiggen
Amazingly accurate. (Reddit)
-Bonus HotD-
“Dim Michele Bachmann Wants To Drill Everglades For Oil That Isn’t There.”
That’s right, Shelly’s energy policy is just poke holes wherever you think there might be oil and screw those crazy geologists who want to dictate to Everyday Americans where there is or isn’t oil. Science is our enemy! (Wonkette)
Stories to Watch: 8/24/11
I missed the roundup today because I got into a fruitless war with the mods at Reddit’s /r/politics subreddit. I tried to submit a story about elections in Libya and it was rejected as “not American news.” It’s a whole big thing, which you can check out here if you’re interested. That subreddit used to be awesome, but lately they’ve been adding pointless restrictions and, worse, getting all anal-retentive about them and now it often sucks. And let’s not even talk about their spam filter; since when is the New York Times a spam site? Anyway, my day sucked. The moral of the story here is don’t waste time on pointless arguments. Now here’s the news…
Gallup polling shows Rick Perry leading the GOP field by a pretty wide margin, ahead of Mitt Romney 29% to 17%. Michele Bachmann is now yesterday’s news. Keep in mind, at this point people don’t really know who Rick Perry is. He’s just the new name in the race.
Obama’s attempts at centrist solutions are costing him the middle.
And about those Libyan elections. If transitional team leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil is right, they’ll happen in eight months. Do the math, that’ll be right in the middle of the ‘12 US presidential campaign. Yeah, /r/politics — no way is that a US political story. How silly of me.
The right gets punked by a hoaxer claiming to be Paul Krugman. Conservative gullibility know no bounds — although rightwing media fact-checking is anything but boundless.
Dick Cheney kept a resignation letter ready — in case his health took a bad turn, not in case he got drunk and shot some guy in the face.
Is Ron Paul just a nut? Yes, Ron Paul is just a nut.
Israel has more than 10,000 millionaires — including 16 billionaires — which raises the question, why on earth is the US sending them foreign aid?
Finally, here we have Jeb Bush; unlikely voice of reason.
Reddit is seriously beginning to piss me off.
Their spam filter is just the worst, most brainless POS. I submitted an article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and it got flagged as spam. Yeah, the biggest newspaper in Wisconsin is a fucking spam site.
Keep up the good work, genius coders at Reddit. You’re doing just a great fucking job!
I just got done voting in Madison, WI. Poll workers said that in the hour the polls have been open they’ve seen more voter turnout than they have in entire election days in the past.
-Neitto, on Reddit
News Roundup for 3/28/11
Only porn-addicted commies know what any of this means
-Headline of the day-
“Are Your Kids Reading Reddit.com & Should You Be Worried?”
Glenn Beck’s fake-news site, The Daily Blaze, asks those two questions and can only answer one; YES, YOU SHOULD BE AFRAID! FREAK OUT! FREAK OUT!!
See, Reddit is “part news aggregator, part message board, and it’s driven by viewer-posted content. Innocent enough. Until you realize it also features porn.”
Oh my God… Porn… On the internet. Sweet Jesus…
Of course, this makes it like pretty much every social bookmarking site. So what makes Reddit stand out for DB scrutiny? If you read through the report, nothing really. There are some porny subreddits you can subscribe to or not subscribe to — nothing’s forced on anyone and, if you want to find them, you’ve really got to look. Mostly it’s goofy photos of cats and complaints about AT&T’s bandwidth caps.
Wait, did I mention that Reddit is overwhelmingly liberal or left-leaning? Yeah, here’s the front page of the politics subreddit, which ought to give you an idea what sort of a problem Beck’s site might really have with Reddit. It’s all “Yay for Wikileaks” and “war sucks” and “rich people aren’t taxed enough” and “Glenn Beck’s squirrelly.”
“Could it be time to add it to your list of blocked sites?” asks concern troll DB. “Or, is it just free speech at work?”
I vote the latter and suspect that’s Beck’s problem with it. Why knock yourself out fighting for censorship when you can convince gullible morons to do all the censoring for you? (Daily Blaze, via porn-riddled Reddit)
-Trapped in the narrative-
When Republicans won big last year, the media was all like “everyone wants to cut spending big time!” Never mind that polls show people want jobs and Republican candidates promised jobs — Republicans are cutting spending, Republicans won, and that means everyone is supposed to want to cut spending. Except they don’t.
This is confusing if you’re a media type.
Which describes Alexander Burns over at Politico. Burns writes that you’ve got all these Republican governors going crazy with the spending cuts and — WTF? — nobody likes it. Their polling numbers are crashing and, in places like Wisconsin, everyone’s all “recall those bastards!” Seriously, what gives?
So Burns talked to a bunch of Republicans (because they’re the only serious people on the planet) and it turns out that voters are just crazy and we don’t know what they want. Sure, GOP governors are taking a whole bunch of stuff away from us, while handing over the keys to the bank to corporations and the wealthy, but that’s just what serious budget-cutting looks like. Really, it’s all just belly-aching and people will come around. Don’t you worry.
“The gist of the piece is that ‘we’ all agree that the message of the 2010 election was that the public has decided that government is too big and wants dramatic budget cuts,” comments Josh Marshall. “But now it seems like the governors who are really going whole hog on this — overwhelming Republicans — are getting really unpopular. Ergo, the public isn’t really ready for the ‘grown-up conversation’ about budgets that it seemed they might be.”
The problem isn’t that Republicans aren’t listening to constituents — although, they aren’t. The problem is that constituents aren’t listening to the governors. Until voters are eager to hand over their wallets to insanely rich people, voters aren’t really serious about deficits. (Politico)
-Bonus HotD-
“After ThinkProgress Video Stokes Controversy, Herman Cain Disavows Pledge Not To Appoint Muslims.”
That’s what you like about Republicans: they have the courage it takes to stand by their convictions — until those convictions prove unpopular.
Then they never held those convictions at all. (ThinkProgress, with video)
