The Best thing since Sliced Bread

I was paging through the Guardian today, when I came across this article in the technology section, a section of the paper I usually only glance at, since I am not a geek.

It’s about a site called Reddit, which works like a news aggregator – collating the most interesting new content on the internet and presenting it on one page. There are a number of sites that do this, such as Yahoo! News, but I never have time for any of them because the content is so generic.

Reddit is different, because it’s democratic. You register, which takes one second, and then submit any story you have found on the Internet that you think deserves a wider reader ship. It’s then displayed as a link, and everyone else can promote or demote it, depending on how interesting they find it. The most popular stories make it to the front page.

As an experiment, I submitted a few pages from my blog, and then monitored the process on a hit counter. Within an hour, I had a hundred hits, which is about 4 times what I’ve ever had in a single day.

None of my stories have risen to the top of the front page (though you can log on and vote for them if you like!), but that’s not the point. A writer needs readers and I was able to reach more people today.

It also gives you that vital thing – feedback. I am learning what the general public finds interesting. For example, they demoted my article about what Jesus and Christmas mean to me, but promoted my take on conspiracy theories.

The next step is to not promote anything tomorrow, and see if I have any people coming back.

So if you read something on the Internet, or even on this blog, that you feel deserves to have a wider readership, submit it to Reddit.

Although it’s obviously still skewed in favour of the demographic that has broadband access, it is – like Wikipedia - a massive step forward in the democratisation of information.