Reddit reviews The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

TL;DR: The conflict over "power users" is due to the fundamental anonymity mismatch created by a site that creates usernames, tracks user involvement but permits no user identification or community beyond 15 characters and two scores. If you care to learn more, read on. If you don't, the following will bore the shit out of you.


I've given this a lot of thought. I've been fortunate to befriend an extremely intelligent social media guru (in the academic sense, not the SEO sense) and the reading list I've gotten off of her has been illuminating as fuck. The following theory owes its creation to the following books:

You are not a gadget

Predictably Irrational

Reality is Broken

The Starfish and the Spider

Further discussion can be found here and here. I realize it's pretty goddamn rude to front-load a conversation with a bibliography and footnotes but I want to emphasize that this is not something I treat flippantly. I have never had as much influence over the behavior of the world as I feel we all do at Reddit and the behaviors we see and experience are, in my opinion, a new social ground that deserves study. Using the 10/10 rule, I believe that public forums such as Reddit are likely to become the preeminent form of communication in the future and wrapping one's head around the foibles and failings of the medium while it still remains the domain of the early adopter is an investment that will pay off in spades going forward.

• • • 
      
      First off, the statement "everybody wants to take the idols down a notch" is indisputable truth, for varying values of "everybody." I would say that messages of support are far more likely to come in via PM and that messages of disparagement are far more likely to come in via public forum. The end result is that "take the idols down a notch" is a socially-condoned behavior while "worshipping the idols" is something that will generally get you shunned. The exception is when Reddit at large is busily worshipping you - post something that Reddit loves and people saying "I love this redditor" will get upvoted. Even then, however, the number of PMs of support you get is generally 5x the number of public accolades. The prevailing culture of Reddit is very much aligned with the (apocryphal?) Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks up will be hammered down."
      
      The reason this attitude prevails is due to the tripartite nature of Reddit and the incongruities it causes. Reddit is, at once and simultaneously,
      
      

• A news website
  
  
• A video game
  
  
• A social site
  
  No one place can be all three of those things without friction.
  
  From a "news" perspective, Reddit could be compared to, say, Gizmodo. The difference is that Gizmodo is a top-down, conventional news site where a select few insiders produce content for a sea of outsiders. The boundary is obvious there - if your name is on the article, you're a for-pay employee. The criticism heaped upon Gizmodo is entirely appropriate because they're journalists. Letters to the Editor date back to the Revolutionary War. Reddit, however, has most of the same characteristics as Gizmodo, minus the editorial wall. So whereas "yell at the name you recognize" is a tradition well-served and understood in the world of journalism, in the everyone-as-editor world of Reddit "yell at the name you recognize" tends to concentrate the insults from those who contribute the least on those who are contributing the most.
  
  From a "video game" perspective, Reddit might as well be Farmville. We see each other's scores growing and when someone else's score grows vastly faster than ours, we're likely to presume they're cheating (particularly when the rules of the game are largely secret and passed down amongst users primarily via folklore). Reddit is also one of the least-rewarding video games ever created, as there are no multicolored sprites or triumphant marches played when a comment or submission scores well. As such, the "hipsterism" of Reddit promotes attacks on those with high karma because, after all, only nerds would spend so much time on a video game that can't even hold a candle to Pac Man. Finally, scores on Reddit are highlighted prominently and are an intrinsic part of the "game" even though the scores hold absolutely no value. Reddit puts "players" in a gold-farming frame of mind without giving them anything to spend their gold on.
  
  Reddit falls apart the most as a "social site." Unlike standard PHPBB communities, you can click on a username and learn exactly nothing about them on Reddit. You can't even see what their top contributions have been. Reddit awards users with a "trophy" for verifying an email address - which occupies the same lofty perch as producing the top daily comment or top daily post on a site with 500,000 users. Reddit is barely removed from the 100% anonymity provided by 4chan - with the exception of the "power users." The fact that we borrowed the term from Digg (where it meant something) and use it here (where it totally doesn't) only makes matters worse, particularly when combined with the poorly-understood mechanisms of Reddit's anti-spam filters. Most Redditors presume that they get a "posting too fast" warning in any given subreddit because they lack the karma to bypass the filter. When I mention it, people are usually flabbergasted that I run into the same problem, despite having a top 20 or 30 combined karma score of all time.
  
  And it's the anonymity mismatch that causes the biggest problem, in my estimation. Ask any redditor to name 5 reddit accounts other than his own and he'll have a hard time. Of those he remembers, dollars to donuts they'll be names that he either a) sees a lot or b) really pissed him off in a flamewar at some point. The rest of it is entirely too anonymous to remember. Probably half of p-dub's comment karma comes from people upvoting him so they could say "do your homework." Probably 3/4ths of L3mm1w1nkz's comment karma comes from his signature "PS I am a shithead." Gimli_the_dwarf, despite having a lot to say and extremely insightful posts, is going to be remembered for "And my axe." This is why novelty accounts flourish on Reddit - they're easy to recognize, easy to remember, and easy to reward.
  
  The flip-side, of course, is they're also easy to punish. The reason Randall doesn't post as xkcd any more, if I had to guess, is that as soon as people decided that xkcd wasn't indisputably funny people jumped on him. That's why so very many of the names that were prominent on this site a year ago are now gone - the opportunities for interaction are so very rare that -
  

we have to build robust, redundant, online-to-offline-and-back networks of rapid communication via trusted networks. trust being in the meat space & heart space that exists between people, not trust based solely on some level of upvoting or amazon.com reputation system or what not. that type of crowd sourcing for importance is part of it, but cannot, should not be all of it. too open to manipulation.

befriend 3-5 online berners closely enough that you trust eachother to connect via other channels. ask each of your network to spread out that way as well. We have to become the Starfishes to thwart the Spiders in the media.

Here's McRaven (the former head of JSOC) thesus

BIG PDF WARNING

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA493691

Here's his book:

http://www.amazon.com/Spec-Ops-Studies-Operations-Practice/dp/0891416005

Might want to checkout the ranger handbook too:

http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/ranger.pdf


These books are good too:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Accidental-Guerrilla-Fighting-Small/dp/0195368347/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345805419&sr=8-1&keywords=accidental+gorilla

http://www.amazon.com/Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Leaderless-Organizations/dp/1591841836/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345805440&sr=1-1&keywords=starfish+and+the+spider

Read The Starfish and the Spider. (or at least the summary: http://www.amazon.com/The-Starfish-Spider-Unstoppable-Organizations/dp/1591841836) It will likely explain what ISIS' strategy is. This is a far more tricky situation for developed countries than, "let's just use our more advanced technology to extinct them all!"

"The powers" really need to take time tore recognize what they're dealing with or it may just end up like another Vietnam.