What began as a noble endeavor quickly spiralled into an online witch hunt as Reddit users desperately tried to pinpoint the suspects behind the Boston bombings last week.
In many ways, the platform helped, delivering pizzas to ailing victims in hospitals, providing therapy dogs and donating relief funds. But the community fell short, as General Manager Erik Martin wrote in a blog post Monday morning called "Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis":
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Reddit draws major traffic, according to Google Analytics shared by Martin, putting it on par with some of the biggest news sites on the internet. As Martin explained, 272,000 users were on site at the time of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's capture Friday night, with 85,000 in /r/news alone. Those numbers made the now-private /r/findbostonbombers the first thread to beat Reddit's homepage in ratings besides Obama's Ask Me Anything.
Above all, those numbers proved that the way we're consuming and gathering news is rapidly changing. As BuzzFeed described in a recent op-ed, "The Media Doesn't Own the Story Anymore," the job of a news organization is no longer to find, vet and share new information but "to guide an audience that has already been exposed to much more."
In this sense, then, Martin was right to issue this closing plea: "We hope that Boston will also be where reddit learns to be sensitive of its own power."
[via Reddit]
