Nope, not the guy. (Photo: Reddit)

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, many Redditors stepped forward to help in the only way they knew how: Gathering up scraps of information from across the Internet and sitting in front of their computer screens sorting through the pile.

Unfortunately, the wisdom of the crowd turned up little beside the suggestion that a missing Brown student might be involved, an accusation that went viral. He wasn't, and now Reddit feels really, really bad.

General manager Erik Martin has posted an actual public apology for Reddit's part in the rumors. (Not the site's usual m.o., to say the least.) While "the vast majority" of Redditors' responses were positive, he said, some of the activity "fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties."

And so: "We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure."

The apology then takes an interesting turn, though, as Mr. Martin reiterates the no-personal-information rule that caused so much drama during last fall's Predditors controversy:

"'Let’s find out who this is' events frequently result in witch hunts, often incorrectly identifying innocent suspects and disrupting or ruining their lives. We hoped that the crowdsourced search for new information would not spark exactly this type of witch hunt. We were wrong. The search for the bombers bore less resemblance to the types of vindictive internet witch hunts our no-personal-information rule was originally written for, but the outcome was no different."

"We hope that Boston will also be where reddit learns to be sensitive of its own power," he concluded. Meanwhile, /r/findbostonbombers is no longer accessible. A message on the landing page says that both suspects have been found, and offers a redirect back to the Reddit homepage.

Can a decentralized horde really develop a super ego, or at least a little poise? Guess we'll find out--and let's hope no one's reputation gets ruined in the meantime.

(Photo: Kleiner Perkins)

Kleiner Perkins partner Ellen Pao, who made headlines last year for suing the company in a widely publicized gender discrimination suit, is gainfully employed once more. After reportedly being fired from KPCB in October 2012, she has now taken a gig at community site Reddit, where she'll be "helping us build strategic partnerships that benefit the community."

Reddit announced the hiring in a blog post published to its site by CEO Yishan Wong. In the post, Mr. Wong states that Ms. Pao has been a "formal and informal advisor to reddit for more than a year." Reddit's general manager Erik Martin said that though Ms. Pao was an advisor, she did not formally invest in Reddit through Kleiner Perkins.

When last we heard from Ms. Pao, she wrote on the question and answer site Quora that she had been fired from KPCB:

“I have been terminated from my job at KPCB. On Monday afternoon, senior management told me to clean out my office, leave, and not come back.

Thank you, Quora community, for your support.”

It's interesting to note that Ms. Pao, who is embroiled in a gender discrimination suit, has opted to work for a community whose relationship to women is rather hostile, but Mr. Martin said Ms. Pao's current legal matters had no bearing either way on the company's decision to hire her. "Ellen is extremely qualified," he told Betabeat.

For its part, Reddit's small team employs a fair amount of women, including Jena Donlin, its senior manager of business operations, and community manager Alex Angel. Mr. Martin said that nine out of 25 of the staff are women.

(Photo: Flappity)

Reddit's primary stoner subreddit, r/trees, boasts close to 450,000 subscribers and an untold number of high lurkers. Apparently, even Snoop Dogg (sorry, Snoop Lion) is a fan: the legendary rapper has signed on to help Reddit with its first official "feel good awards event," appropriately dubbed The Munchies.

According to a post published to r/trees by Reddit general manager Erik Martin, "the online world needs an annual feel good event for 4/20 and /r/trees is just the place to host the party." Because when we think about what the Internet really needs, the first thought that comes to mind is definitely a weed-themed awards event.

Because stoners refuse to be burdened by THE MAN, there are no limits to how The Munchies will operate: users will submit category ideas and nominations in The Munchies thread, on which they will then vote. On 4/20, Snoop will announce the winners by video.

Redditors are already chiming in with their highdeas: "I vote Lion King for Movie of the Year." Cool.

(Photo: CNN)

Last night, the now-notorious Reddit troll Violentacrez, whom Gawker recently exposed as a 49-year-old Texas-based programmer named Michael Brutsch, appeared on Anderson Cooper 360 for God knows what reason. In the painfully awkward two-part interview, during which Mr. Cooper thankfully gave us a commercial break to collect ourselves and tweet our thoughts, Mr. Brutsch invoked every possible excuse to justify his poor behavior, which includes creating controversial subreddits like PicsofDeadKids and Jailbait.

Throughout the interview, Mr. Brutsch referred to his Reddit username Violentacrez in the third person, echoing other statements he's made about Violentacrez being a character he played and attempting to distance himself from taking personal responsibility for his actions. He also admitted that his sole purpose for creating racist and misogynistic subreddits was to get a rise out of people (he bragged he has a "gift" for it) in order to accumulate "meaningless internet points."

Shortly after the interview aired, Mr. Brutsch again took to Reddit under his clean handle "mbrutsch" and admitted that appearing on CNN was a "huge mistake, which I will not repeat." He also agreed with users who alleged that Reddit's statement given to CNN is actually riddled with factual inaccuracies. "It was suprising that the admins straight up lied about banning VA multiple times," one user wrote. "Didn't surprise me at all," replied Mr. Brutsch.

Still, it was rather shocking to witness Mr. Brutsch's willingness to completely throw Reddit, a platform he has essentially dedicated his life to for the past five years, under the bus in order to save his own neck. Though he was once a Reddit power user, tapped by administrators to wrangle the darkest subreddits and keep illegal content from cropping up on them, he has continually called Reddit admins out for lying and for not having his back.

"Reddit encouraged and enabled this kind of behavior," he said last night on CNN. Even Redditors whose inconsistent "free speech" logic (keep Jailbait, but block Gawker links) put them in allegiance with Mr. Brutsch probably won't appreciate hearing him blame his trolling on Reddit, both as a platform and community.

We've reached out to Reddit general manager Erik Martin to ask for comment on Mr. Brutsch's accusation and will update when we hear back. But it's true that Reddit administrators have been supportive of Mr. Brutsch's behavior in the past. Mr. Brutsch also brought along to the interview a gold-plated bobblehead that Reddit administrators gave to him for creating Jailbait, a subreddit where users posted sexualized photos of minors. The Atlantic Wire points out that the statue was given to Mr. Brutsch as a token for creating "Worst Reddit," which still seems like a knowing nod and thumbs up to his behavior on the site.

This reporter is a frequent user of Reddit, in both her personal and professional life, and a fan of the platform as a fount of information. At its best, it can be an open forum for thoughtful conversation, hilarious asides and friendly knowledge sharing. But this incident has shed new light on the dark underbelly of a platform that just recently hosted a Q&A with the President of the United States.

It may seem like cognitive dissonance for Reddit to host forums like RapingWomen alongside TwoXChromosomes, but the site is also a microcosm of the Internet at large: full of some of the most wonderful people, but also some of the worst. Still, the laissez-faire attitude of Reddit admins towards the sexist and misogynistic content is concerning at best and borderline-disgusting at worst. As Anil Dash put it, "Reddit does many good things, but is also a horrendously sexist culture."

Of course, this realization is nothing new--the MensRights subreddit has been around for ages, and the internet as a whole has long been a complicated place for women to exist. But the Violentacrez scandal, coupled with that of Creepshots and Predditors, has put the conversation about Reddit's attitudes towards its female users at the forefront.

At least one woman we know, an active Redditor who has attended meetups and accrued a fair amount of "meaningless Internet points," has shut down her account in response to the recent news. "[Violentacrez] is the catalyst, yes, but the general culture of casual racism and misogyny as well," she tweeted.

Through its handling of the Violentacrez crisis, as well as last year's Jailbait scandal, Reddit has emphasized time and time again that it wants to be a platform that embraces free speech, right up to the line of illegality (but never crossing it). This will turn off some users, and perhaps cultivate a culture rife with racism and misogyny, under the banner of free speech. It is not, however, somehow immune to the criticism these types of decisions will evoke from Redditors and the media alike.

As Ken at Popehat wrote in his excellent piece on Reddit, Gawker and anonymity:

Creepers and pedophiles and bigots make up only a tiny minority of Redditors; people angry that they are being criticized make up only a slightly larger minority. Comments from Reddit administrators in the wake of the child pornography outcry has made clear that Reddit wants to be a free speech site that permits everything that the law does not prohibit. That's fine. I'd defend Reddit's freedom to publish what the law allows. But Redditors need not be taken seriously to the extent they believe they have a protected right to be free of criticism and ridicule and inquiry. You can argue all you want that forums like — oh, say, the /r/BeatingWomen subreddit — should be free to thrive without criticism. Moderators can indulge your feelings by banning critics. Moderators can decide to ban links to Gawker on the theory that if you take pictures of children in public and post them for the sexual pleasure of misfit neckbeards, you have a right to privacy that should prevent anyone from identifying you. But Reddit administrators and moderators and Redditors can't stop everyone else from calling out their conduct and their oddly inconsistent philosophy. Private individuals decrying, ridiculing, and even using their skills to identify Redditors are using a classic "more speech" remedy to speech they don't like. It's a feature, not a bug, of free speech.

Of course, individuals on Reddit are also responsible for their own actions. No matter how much Mr. Brutsch claims Reddit "encouraged and enabled his behavior," it was still just a platform full of--as he says--"college kids," and it was ultimately his decision to dutifully play into their twisted tastes. Now, he's paying the price for that: he's lost his job and his health insurance and has ultimately become the face of Internet trolldom. Reddit's reputation will recover from this poor publicity fiasco, but the rep of its most notorious troll probably won't.

(Photo: Reddit)

For the last few hours, the controversial subreddit Creepshots--which is at the center of an "inter-website war" over photos users published of non-consenting women--has been inaccessible.

The message "This subreddit has been banned" is affixed front and center. The banned page notes that the subreddit may have been caught in the site's spam filter, but Reddit general manager Erik Martin confirmed to Betabeat that a moderator from Creepshots asked an admin to ban the subreddit.

Previously: Reddit Readies for Brewing 'Inter-Website War'; Major Subreddits Ban Link to Gawker Media

Creepshots' former members immediately flocked to r/Creepsquad, set up for refugees of the shuttered subreddit. Now, Mr. Martin has also confirmed to Betabeat that Reddit administrators have decided--without moderator request--to ban Creepsquad as well. It went dark around 8 p.m. this evening.

Mr. Martin, who is still on the Reddit Open Internet bus tour, declined to elaborate why the subreddit had been banned.

Earlier this evening, the moderators of Creepsquad published a photo of Jezebel journalist Katie J.M. Baker to the front page of the subreddit, perhaps in an effort to intimidate her. Ms. Baker has been the target of Reddit backlash following a story she published yesterday featuring an interview with the anonymous woman behind Predditors, a Tumblr that publishes the personal information of Creepshots members who have been publishing photos of women without their consent. Predditors was removed by Tumblr, but has since been reinstated after a Tumblr spokesman said it was mistakenly believed to be revealing private information. Tumblr users have been passing around a master list of the "Predditors" after the author password-protected the original Tumblr.

Previously: Tumblr Reinstates Predditors, the Controversial Blog Publishing Personal Info About Redditors Behind Creepshots

Ms. Baker appears to be taking it all in stride. "Flattered that moderators of r/Creepsquad respect me enough to put a photo of me on the main page of their subreddit!" she coyly tweeted.

The removal of Creepsquad by Reddit admins comes as somewhat of a surprise. In an interview with Buzzfeed earlier today, Mr. Martin emphasized that Reddit does not remove content unless it violates one of Reddit's five rules. That implies that Creepsquad was removed because it violated one of those tenets, though he did not offer any details other than to admit it was removed by administrators.

There is precedent for banning subreddits. Last year, Reddit found itself embroiled in a controversy over r/jailbait, a subreddit where users posted sexualized photos of minors. Reddit subsequently updated its policy to include a new rule.

UPDATE: 

Reddit community manager and site admin David Croach has banned Potato_in_my_anus, the maturely-named user who created the now-banned subreddit Creepsquad. In a thread on Subreddit Drama, Mr. Croach wrote:

Regarding PIMA's ban...

There are actually a lot of rules that we (the admins) recently found out when we investigated his (PIMA's) account that he had broken. The most recent one was creating a subreddit that disregarded the rules of reddit regarding sexualizing teens/minors, and not being active in moderating posts that broke that rule. He's had multiple offenses in that category.

Here is a screenshot of the photo that Creepsquad posted of Ms. Baker, without comment, to the front page of the subreddit:

(Photo: Reddit)

He even uploaded this pic to Imgur like a real Redditor would. (Photo: Imgur)

A little over 20 minutes ago, President Obama announced that he would be doing an AMA on Reddit, and the Internet promptly imploded. Within minutes of the announcement, it was confirmed by both Reddit moderators and the New York Times. Ladies, geeks and lady geeks everywhere swooned at the photo of the President stationed at his Macbook prepared to address the Reddit masses, who will undoubtedly only ask questions about weed.

Founder Alexis Ohanian took the opportunity to wax a lil' nostalgic: "Fun fact," he tweeted. "POTUS doing @reddit AMA from C-Ville, VA -- where 7 yrs ago Steve & I founded the company that would build @reddit."

We promptly gChatted Reddit general manager Erik Martin: "On a scale of 1-10, how much are you freaking out right now?" we asked. "Trying to stay cool right now," he replied. "But still at an 11."

Reddit's servers took a pounding from the heavy traffic heaped on the site following the announcement: We got a "Reddit is under heavy load right now" error page several times while trying to read the AMA, and eventually got through, but only in read-only mode. ("Read only is being thrown out intermittently," Mr. Martin told us.)

Read-only (Photo: Reddit)

We still can't get the page to load to display the President's answers, but an earlier version of the post gives a glimpse into the (unbearably stereotypical) questions Redditors are asking: Yes, they are about space and Internet freedom.

Still, this is an exciting moment for the 7-year-old social news site that's seen tremendous growth over the last few years.

"How the hell did you guys pull this one off?" asked one Redditor, who later emailed Betabeat to identify himself as Beau Agnello.

"This is reddit. You all pulled this off by becoming the front page of the internet," replied Mr. Ohanian, adding "edit: I'm also hoping the administration was so responsive because secretly they're all redditors."

Update:

A screenshot posted to Twitter offers us a glimpse into what's currently going on inside the AMA: Neckbeards correcting POTUS's grammar:

(Photo: Twitter.com/gwynz)

Update 2:

Aaaand we have another typo. Oof.

(Photo: YFrog, user: jtes)

Update 3:

AllThingsD asked Mr. Ohanian how he got President Obama to do the AMA. He responded:

There’s not a lot to it. I’ve gotten to know quite a few folks in the WH & Obama campaign team over the years and it was always something I brought up when I got the chance. There are quite a few redditors at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave and at the campaign HQ — given the prominence of reddit, it’s an easy sell.

Oh, you fancy, huh?

Update 4:

President Obama seems to have a weird relationship with capitalization. He doesn't capitalize the name of his wife or Afghanistan, but he does, however, cap Chicago Bulls.

Our copy editor adds that there are at least four grammatical errors in this sentence: "We need to start with passing the Disclose Act that is already written and been sponsored in Congress - to at least force disclosure of who is giving to who."

Update 5:

The American flag flair bestowed upon the President's username is the cutest:

(Photo: Reddit)

Update 6:

The AMA is officially over, with POTUS heading back to Washington D.C. in time for dinner. He posted the following update by way of a goodbye:

LAST UPDATE: I need to get going so I'm back in DC in time for dinner. But I want to thank everybody at reddit for participating - this is an example of how technology and the internet can empower the sorts of conversations that strengthen our democracy over the long run. AND REMEMBER TO VOTE IN NOVEMBER - if you need to know how to register, go to http://gottaregister.com. By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience - NOT BAD!

Knows his memes? Not bad.

(Photo: Know Your Meme)

Update 7:

Adam Fletcher, spokesman for the Obama campaign, has provided Betabeat with the following quote:

“More than 40 million people use Reddit every month, and the President’s “Ask Me Anything” session gave him a chance to answer directly a wide variety of questions from this group.”

(Photo: Indiegogo)

First came the Declaration of Internet Freedom, a document defending a free and open internet that would probably have moved the Founding Fathers to eye-roll, hard-core, had they been around to see it. Then there was the Internet Defense League, a collection of websites that promised to bond together in the name of the internet whenever the signal of a cat is flashed. And now? Well, now there's a bus tour, spearheaded by Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, to raise awareness about the importance of a free internet across the country.

The "free internet" movement cropped up following the SOPA and PIPA debates, and its devotees believe that the government should not censor the internet. Mr. Ohanian and Reddit's general manager, Erik Martin, are raising $20,000 on Indiegogo for the Internet 2012 Bus Tour,  a raucous ride from Denver, Colo., to Danville, Ky. "We’ll host meetups, highlight candidates who support free and open Internet, get people to sign up to vote, feature local tech jobs, and shoot awesome video of the whole thing," reads the campaign statement.

The gang will be collecting suggestions for route stops on the subreddit r/Internet2012; at those stops, they plan to "talk to local startups, college students, media, politicians and grassroots organizations about the power and promise of the Open Internet."

It's interesting to note the campaign's planned route, which snakes from the site of the first presidential debate in Colorado to that of the first vice presidential debate in Kentucky. The tour is focused on middle America, the everyday users of the internet who aren't engaged in the Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley battle, and instead are simply interested in how policies might affect the way they live their lives.

Choosing middle America was "a very conscious choice," Mr. Martin told Betabeat by Gchat. "The Open Internet often gets categorized as an issue for Silicon Valley & Hollywood, and a few other specific regions, but the Open Internet is important in every district. And it's not even about Internet and high-growth tech start-ups (of which there are many in the midwest), but it's about all of the tools now in the hands of small business, local governments, and individuals."

Mr. Rose (Photo: flickr.com/joi)

In the winter of 2004, soon after the husks of once-great dot-com startups had dried and shriveled, a 27-year-old college dropout named Kevin Rose deployed a barebones new site, simply named “Digg.”

It was one of the first social networks in existence. Back then, the term “social networking” hadn’t shouldered its way into our lexicon yet. Facebook was a nascent, walled platform for college gossip; Google was still idly toying with its search algorithm; Twitter wouldn’t launch for another two years.

News itself was a hierarchical affair, largely produced and disseminated by trusted broadcasters and editors. Journalism’s democratizing forces hadn’t congealed, yet; bloggers weren’t sitting front row at fashion shows or making a living off of Google Ads. The idea that a community of Internet geeks could manipulate the news cycle would’ve elicited howls of mocking laughter from the Conde kingmakers.

Mr. Rose, then an occasional tech TV talking head, launched Digg with the notion that it would change all that. Digg wants “to give the power back to the people,” proclaimed Mr. Rose in a 2005 preview of the website on the tech TV show The Screen Savers. By “digging” or “burying” links, users could effectively weed out the detritus and let the news they liked best filter its way to the top. The site’s functionality gave users the power to decide what deserved to be seen, and they were rewarded by spotting links early that would eventually become popular. Diggers garnered further clout by interacting with each other. Real power users began to emerge, enabled by their nimble maneuverings on the platform.

These days, stodgy publications like The New York Times pen fawning profiles of BuzzFeed bloggers and Business Insider newshounds, seemingly entranced by their mystical ability to foresee what will go viral. But Digg’s power users are the predecessors of keen-eyed bloggers, and Digg gave them the platform to broadcast their Internet soothsaying abilities. “The service forced me to get very good at finding news and interesting stories — and doing it fast,” wrote one-time Digg power user, former tech reporter and current venture capitalist M.G. Siegler in a recent blog post. “It also forced me to hone my headline writing skills.... Without Digg, I almost certainly would not be where I am now.”

“It was the first iteration of social news and social sharing,” Aubrey Sabala, an early employee of Digg, told Betabeat by phone. “In a lot of ways it was ahead of its time.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Internet revolution: following a handful of hefty capital rounds, mounting investor pressure put the focus on monetization. And some of Digg’s power users turned to the dark side, allowing advertisers and publishers to pay them for “diggs” so that their content could make it to the front page. In 2009, Digg rolled out a clunky ad experience, much to the chagrin of its fan base, which began to jump ship for Facebook and Twitter. A buggy overhaul of the site released in 2010 was the final straw: Digg crested the hill on its final decline, the majority of the site’s devoted users eventually decamping for Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

But now Digg, the sleeping--or is it dead?--community giant, is getting the chance to redeem and recreate itself in the moneyed bosom of the New York tech scene, thanks to an acquisition by startup incubator Betaworks. Betaworks, nestled in the Meatpacking district steps away from the Highline, purchased Digg’s core assets just a handful of weeks ago, and set out to recreate the Digg experience from the ground up. What’s left of the Digg brand will be revived by the News.me team, another Betaworks social news startup that has been tapped to resurrect Digg’s decrepit corpse. And they've done it in just six weeks.

It’s an opportunity few startups ever get: to atone for their sins and start from scratch in a safety bubble, protected from the pressures of monetization and investor interests. They can build a purer product this time, learn from the lessons of Digg’s former incarnation, and hone in on accurately catering to the way users consume news.

But with its one-time competitor Reddit miles ahead in the race for relevancy, is it too late?

***

Mr. Borthwick with Mr. Siegler (Photo: flickr.com/techcrunch)

Less than 24 hours before the launch of the new version of Digg, Betabeat arrived at the Betaworks office, an airy, sprawling labyrinth of Apple products and side-by-side desks occupied by work crazed young people. We’d arrived just in time for a chocolate covered banana cart to show up, heralding a quaint office gathering celebrating the new Digg. Jake Levine, the former manager of News.me who became manager of Digg following the acquisition, told us that before the acquisition went through, he talked about Digg in codewords to his teammates. “We called it the banana stand,” he said, referring to a beloved Arrested Development plotline.

“Digg is one of the great iconic web 2.0 brands,” said Betaworks CEO John Borthwick in a clipped British accent, after we’d settled into a corner conference room littered with Betaworks stickers. (Sadly, there would be no frozen bananas for this Betabeat reporter.) Through the glass doors, we could see a red pole strung up with a Guy Fawkes mask, the universal symbol for the hacker group Anonymous. “It helped define a whole new wave of company creation and innovation," Mr. Borthwick went on. "But also this idea of socially curated news is something that they helped create.”

It was a pure idea, but the infusion of capital, coupled with the inherent drawbacks of the Digg voting model, ultimately led to Digg’s demise. “The company raised a lot of money maybe a little bit too fast and couldn’t figure out how to make money and then sort of went through a painful process of growing downwards,” Mr. Borthwick admitted. “Sometimes companies get pumped up like athletes full of steroids, so much so that they’re really strong and fit but they can’t actually walk any longer so they kind of fall over on their own weight.”

In short: mo’ money, mo’ problems.

Mr. Levine (Photo: Twitter)

Digg’s rebirth will also happen in a very different media environment. “It’s 2012, it’s not 2004,” emphasized Mr. Borthwick. “So what Digg needs is to change a little bit.” By scrapping the old code and rebuilding the infrastructure, Mr. Borthwick said that the new Digg will operate at 1/15th of the cost that the old Digg was running at just last month.

Additionally, now media companies that previously mocked the power of online communities are clamoring to plaster their links all over social news sites. Conde Nast snapped Reddit up back in 2006, hoping to expand its web properties, but its DNA never really fit the Conde mold, due to the site’s unwavering dedication to its community and refusal to cater to publishers. Social news communities like Reddit have grown from a barnacle on the side of the Internet to one of its primary content generators. Traffic-hungry blogs like BuzzFeed source a substantial amount of their content right from the trenches of Reddit. And with 2.5 billion pageviews a month, the amount of traffic Reddit can drive to a site in a single day could trounce pageview targets for an entire quarter. (Previously: Loving the Alien: How Erik Martin, King Bee of Reddit's Hivemind, Harnessed the Buzz)

For its part, Digg may have spread itself too thin, attempting to simultaneously placate disparate groups with competing interests. “I feel like when they moved to version 4, they were trying to serve too many constituencies: publishers, the users and the advertisers,” Erik Martin, Reddit’s general manager, told Betabeat by phone. That 4th version, which launched in 2010 and introduced publishers to the site, was so buggy that it crippled Digg’s functionality for weeks. "Many people will tell you that v4 of Digg was the tipping point, and I agree, for a simple reason," Miguel Lopez, a former Digg power user, told Betabeat by email. "It alienated the hardcore users and the community that had formed around the site.... They drove their most loyal users away, and for any 'social' site that is plain suicide."

“The front page went from interesting, to a bunch of corporate sponsored ads and a few threads that managed to squeak through,” wrote one Reddit user in a recent post about what killed Digg. “I didn’t come to Reddit because it was better or because it replaced digg for me, I came here because digg had a sudden heart attack and died.”

So how did Reddit avoid the same tragic fate as Digg? Its algorithms don’t allow users to collaborate and game the system, for one. “The frontpage we designed was a constantly rising and falling list of links (not like how digg and all of its clones just had a chronological format where once something got enough diggs it became #1 on the frontpage--an easily exploitable way to get a ton of traffic),” said Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian in an email. “It's not perfect, as we're always fighting cheaters, but we've also had to explain to an unsettling number of publishers that reddit, unlike its past competition, is not designed to be ‘gamed.’ We've had to reprimand quite a bit of bad behavior that used to be the status quo.”

In a way, Reddit is immune from many of the pressures that Silicon Alley startups are forced to contend with. Being scooped up by Conde did have its privileges. Unlike Digg, Reddit didn’t have to rely solely on ad revenue to sustain itself. Had Digg curbed its hubris and accepted Google’s offer of $200 million for an acquisition in 2008, it may not have had to roll out so many of the premium features--like “Diggable ads”--that drove users away. “We’ve been lucky in a sense with the Conde Nast situation,” admitted Mr. Martin. “It did protect us from having to quickly monetize.”

The new Digg, which will be tweaked with scientific precision at the lab-like Betaworks, won’t have any ads at all--at least not in version one. It will also be free of the clutter that has bloated Digg for years: with no Digg navigation bar and no “Newsroom” feature, it will be image-friendly, lightweight and easy to use on your cell phone. The interface looks a lot like a typical news blog, with a large image and headline dominating the top half of the screen, while other stories collect in neat boxes beneath it.

In a nod to the dominant forces of social media, the number of “Diggs” on a story will also account for the times it’s been shared on Facebook and Twitter, in order to provide a more holistic portrait of what’s popular across the web. This move also has the added benefit of making it much harder for power users to game the system. For version 1, users will have to login using Facebook Connect in order to "Digg" a story, a temporary move that already has some legacy users riled up.

“There’s a lot of attention and pressure and visibility for tomorrow,” Mr. Levine told us of the version 1 launch. “But what we care about is not launch day, it’s the 14 days or 28 days after launch and the iterations that follow.”

“We could have spent six months on it or a year, but we realized that if this was going to be a good product then we needed to get it out the door as quickly as possible,” he added. “The six week time frame forced really hard decisions, to focus on what is the single thing that Digg does well and that users expect from Digg, and how we could do that well.”

***

A few weeks prior to the launch of the new Digg, the Betaworks team published a survey to their blog soliciting user feedback. The consensus was unanimous: 92 percent of those surveyed would not recommend the old version of Digg to a friend. Users wanted the simpler Digg back, the one that surfaced interesting content and enabled a community of diverse individuals to post and respond to stories they cared about.

“I spent a weekend reading through all of the responses, and time and time again they said, ‘I came to Digg to find great stories. I came to Digg to find stories I couldn’t find elsewhere, the weird and the funny and the geeky,’” said Mr. Levine. That’s where the new Digg will start. From the belly of Betaworks, it will eschew revenue models and investor interests and focus on remaking Digg into the kind of site Internet users used to love.

Digg once went in search of monetization, but now the new team behind it wants what the platform was offering all along: a snapshot of the hivemind, a place capable of measuring the Internet’s pulse. Now, the new Digg team has the same advantage that Reddit obtained when it sold to Conde.

“Part of what we want to do is stay as small as possible for as long as possible,” said Mr. Levine. “So that we can continue to be beholden to just our users, and not incentives for monetization.”

On the back of his iPhone case, a black and white “Fuck it Ship it” sticker caught the lamplight just right.

(Photo: Brooke Hammerling, Instagram)

Last night, gangs of glammed-out New York techies and science enthusiasts trekked uptown to the Rose Center for Earth and Space to take in a stunningly optimistic program presented by Gizmodo and the American Museum of Natural History. The event was planned and hosted by Gawker Media founder Nick Denton (with the help of Brew PR), who appeared so eager about the "celebration of technology and discovery" that he tweeted about it numerous times prior to the event, published a grandiose blog post on Gizmodo reveling in the glorious achievements of science, and sent out an email to attendees: "This evening should be inspiring and fun," he wrote.

"I've never seen Nick so excited for a social event," one colleague remarked.

And who could begrudge Mr. Denton his excitement? The event was everything he claimed it would be--and perhaps more, depending on how many free cocktails you indulged in. Hosted by Ellen V. Futter, the president of the American Museum of Natural History, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and Mr. Denton himself, the gathering was as swank and inspiring as expected.

Betabeat arrived to the First Comes the Dream event around 7:30 p.m. and immediately checked in on Foursquare, as tech reporters at Foursquare-branded events are wont to do. As residents of Brooklyn, we were happy to discover we'd unlocked the Far Far Away badge--"Welcome to the world above 59th street!" it exclaimed.

In the lobby of the Rose Center, we were checked in via an iPad by a lovely woman from Brew PR, who handed us a program and directed us to the Hayden Planetarium, where the night's first event would take place. The entry hallway to the Planetarium was packed with eager attendees swigging wine and snacking on cheese and grapes. We spotted Reddit general manager Erik Martin collecting drinks for fellow attendees at the bar and stopped to say hi. He escorted us over to his group, which included Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and Gawker head of ops Scott Kidder, who had just gotten back from a trip to Budapest.

"I'm a daily Betabeat reader," admitted Mr. Kidder. "But you guys should post more." (We're working on it--promise.)

Mr. Martin and Mr. Ohanian could only stay for the first half hour of the event, as they had to get to an Internet Defense League party–complete with a stories-sized projection–downtown.

Notable names gathered at the museum included Gilt Groupe founder and CEO Kevin Ryan, NY1 newspaper addict Pat Kiernan and his colleague Jamie Shupak with New York Times media nerd Brian Stelter, and AllThingsD honcho Kara Swisher, in town from San Francisco. We also spotted NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr., father of RSS Dave Winer, Talking Points Memo deputy publisher Callie Schweitzer, and Business Insider startup reporter Alyson Shontell. A sci-fi themed string quartet scored the evening with Star Trek and Star Wars songs, while the crowd bantered and nursed their cocktails.

Soon we were ushered into the Hayden Planetarium, where we found a seat in front of Branch founder Josh Miller and his mentor, former Twitter VP of Product and current COO of the Obvious Corporation, Jason Goldman. Ms. Futter, AMNH's president, began her opening remarks as Scrollkit founder Cody Brown and New York Times media reporter David Carr snuck to their seats.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr. said a few words before deputy mayor for economic development Robert K. Steel took the podium, lamenting the fact that Ms. Futter called the astronaut "cool" but not him. Soon, the lights began to dim and the crowd was treated to a stunning walkthrough of current NASA data displayed on the Planetarium's dome by ANMH's director of astrovisualization, the lion-maned Carter Emmart.

(Photo: American Museum of Natural History, Instagram)

We craned our necks back to take in the dizzying site: Data captured just yesterday danced across the screen as Mr. Emmart zoomed in and out. He took us to the international space station, and then out further to the moon, where he focused in on some craters before taking us out further still, to Mars. Next we were viewing our entire galaxy, and then out as far as possible so that the millions of galaxies scientists have documented twinkled like pinpoints of light on the vast darkness of the unknown. There was much oohing and aahing. When Mr. Emmart remarked that his time was up, one person in the audience actually yelped: "Awww!"

The presentation was easily one of the coolest things Betabeat had ever seen. We weren't the only ones. "I don't know what to do about how much I love space," tweeted New York Times reporter Jenna Wortham.

As the lights came back on, the crowd shuffled into elevators and down to the Cullman Hall of the Universe, where drinks and hors d'oeuvres were served and the string quartet cleared from the stage to make room for i09 editor in chief Annalee Newitz and renowned physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Mr. Tyson, who skipped a pre-screening of The Dark Knight Rises to attend, was arguably the biggest attraction of the night. At the mere mention of his name by Ms. Futter earlier, the crowd burst out into spontaneous applause. The director of the Hayden Planetarium since 2000, Mr. Tyson has risen to cult status in recent years, thanks to a combination of blatant genius and a wry brand of humor that lends him a personability untouched by most physicists. To the crowd of science geeks and Redditors on the Internet, Mr. Tyson is basically a god: memes have been carved in his name for years.

The energy in the room was palpable as Mr. Tyson took the stage and the crowd erupted into wild applause. Ms. Newitz proved a deft interviewer, easily matching Mr. Tyson's impressive wit. He spoke of his dream plans for NASA ("I want aliens to be proud of what we've done"), of why we need to rekindle our space-race era love for science, and how much he loves Star Trek. At one point, while answering a question about his ideal space program, he referenced a ship that could be outfitted with various "strap-ons." The audience giggled nervously. "That's... not the right word," he admitted, chuckling, before moving on, while patches of the audience muffled their guffaws.

Soon, program wranglers were giving Ms. Newitz the cue to wrap it up, and Mr. Tyson closed the session with remarks about how to get inspired about science again. Hungry and tired, we ducked out of the event and trotted to the exit, where we were handed a First Comes the Dream-branded moleskin and wished a pleasant evening.

All of this talk about space just made us want to go up to the stars. Luckily, we ran into the one person perhaps best enabled to allow us to reach our goal: tech investor (and former journalist) Esther Dyson. Ms. Dyson is on the board of XCor, a private corporation aiming to bring sub-orbital flight to the general public, or as general a public that can afford a $95,000 per-flight ticket. Ms. Dyson told us that she was recently trying out spacesuits for the company - she's planning to be on the last flight before the company opens it up to the masses. We eagerly asked when we could join in on the zero-gravity fun. "A few years," she told us, reassuring us that, while she would be getting a preview to the experience, she would be going up after they test it thoroughly: "When they get it right."

Though we typically bleed skepticism, we found ourselves uncharacteristically moved by the event as we crossed the park to catch a cab. The air was thick with summer, the musk of trees momentarily eclipsing the normal exhaust fumes that blanket the city. We felt filled with the vastness of space the way we always do after leaving the planetarium (we are embarrassingly regular guests there), aware again of the knowledge of just how tiny our lives, our planet, even our galaxy are.

"First comes the dream," we thought.

It was probably just the wine.

Mr. Martin (Photo: Reddit)

The top-scoring link of all time on the social news website Reddit is a post that users were never meant to see at all. It is titled “test post please ignore,” but almost 27,000 Redditors found it so amusing that they voted it up.

That is testament to the website’s impassioned community—and their brand of dry, often geeky humor (the site’s logo is an alien, after all). But Reddit’s user base, which a recent PBS documentary pegged as 72 percent male, has wide-ranging interests. Other top posts include a link to a news item about the elderly volunteering to clean up nuclear waste in Japan following the 2011 tsunami, and a Q&A session with the famous astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Reddit is one of the country’s most highly trafficked websites, but its general manager, Erik Martin, keeps a remarkably low profile. Most Redditors know the 33-year-old Mr. Martin solely by his username: HueyPriest.

“Part of that’s just me, but part of it is like, we never wanted Reddit to be about the people who work there,” Mr. Martin told Betabeat on the second floor of a San Francisco café that was swiftly inching toward sweltering in the late April heat. Dressed in a plaid button-down and jeans, with dark circles forming beneath his eyes, he looked every bit the startup ingenue. “We don’t want it to be this cult of personality thing that I think some sites get turned into.”

Owned by Advance Publications, Reddit is not a publisher but a platform that allows users to share links, stories and multimedia. Often referred to as the “front page of the Internet,” it is notorious for inside jokes. While cartoon rage comics, for instance, may have originated on the ever-more-offensive 4chan message boards, they certainly reached their apex on Reddit (just read the recent New York Times article for confirmation on that). Users also can create their own “subreddits”—or sections—based on any topic of their choosing, and volunteers with no formal association to Reddit moderate them. Democratization is inherently woven into the site’s functionality: users vote posts up or down at their pleasure: The more votes a post gets, the better chance it has of making it to the “front page,” where the most readers will see it.

And an eye-popping number of users do see it: the site averages 2.5 billion pageviews a month. With user statistics like that, and an especially loyal following, detractors have derided it as a “hive mind,” but that doesn’t fully account for the complexity and generosity of the community: A few months ago, the site hosted a poignant question-and-answer session with a survivor of Norway’s Utøya massacre, for example, and there are countless threads that help collect donations for the community’s sick or needy members.

“‘Hive mind’ is often used pejoratively, and I definitely understand what people are referring to, but I think the idea of a hive mind works pretty well for bees,” offered Mr. Martin, when asked about Reddit’s “upvote now-assess later” tendencies. For bees, he explained, a hive mind means that it takes a democratic consensus to make an important decision, like where to construct a new hive.

“[The hive mind] is a very fast, sort of reactionary thing, and that has bad results sometimes, results where people are not as skeptical as maybe they should be. You need to make sure enough bees are going to double-check the new location. You need a bunch of bees going like, ‘You are right, that is a pretty great new home, it has a tire swing.’”

A little history: In 2005, the site’s young co-founders, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, were accepted by the startup incubator Y Combinator for its first-ever round. A year later, in a push to expand its online brand, Condé Nast acquired Reddit for between $10 million and $20 million. At the time, Reddit averaged just 70,000 unique daily visitors.

After the sale, Condé worked feverishly to fold Reddit into its stable of well-established print brands, like Vogue and Wired. “We thought of Reddit, [technology blog] Ars Technica and Wired as what Condé Nast deemed the ‘innovation group,’” said Jena Donlin, who runs business operations for Reddit and still works out of the Condé Nast office in Times Square.

Mr. Martin, who had majored in American Studies at Tulane and worked in the documentary film industry, served as the site’s community manager at the time, a role that he said entailed “answering user questions, dealing with spam and finding cool things in the community to promote.”

By all accounts, Mr. Martin also played a significant role in ushering in a successful transition from an independently run website to a division of a major publishing conglomerate. What made the job even harder was that Reddit’s approach to publishing exemplified the democratizing influence of the web, which at that very moment was violently destabilizing the whole we-speak-you-listen model that Condé Nast, with its pantheon of all-powerful editors, had long since mastered.

As Reddit’s user base continued to grow following the acquisition, the tension between the democratized user-generated site and its ancient publishing parent became more pronounced. Reddit does not offer traditional advertising, so its primary stream of revenue came in the form of Reddit Gold, a paid premium membership subscription, as well as what Mr. Martin called “self-serve ads for mom-and-pop shops” and carefully selected marketing partnerships.

The site, which boasts a barebones user interface that harkens back to the halcyon days of ’90s Usenet groups, has always shunned traditional advertising, a stance that even a cash-starved, ad-hungry Condé Nast couldn’t change. Monetizing Reddit is something Condé Nast “has still not been able to figure out,” Mr. Ohanian said in a 2010 episode of Big Think, adding, “Reddit has a fantastic audience ... How do we advertise to them in a way that isn’t screwing them as a user and at the same time providing enough value to an advertiser to want to do it?”

(Photo: Flickr.com/teuobk)

But in August 2010, an advertising controversy erupted between the stodgy parent company and its willful child. The activist group “Just Say Now” wanted to host self-serve ads on Reddit in support of the proposed California marijuana legalization law Prop 19, but Condé Nast refused. The Reddit team responded by agreeing to host Just Say Now’s ads on their site for free, a move that was still technically within the bounds of the parent company’s rules, but made a strong point.

Reddit’s traffic continued to explode, and in early 2011, the site was getting upward of two billion pageviews a month. Condé Nast wasn’t equipped to handle the technological and cultural challenges that came with that kind of traffic. And the tensions between the little-website-that-could and its old-school parent company were starting to take their toll. “In the spring of 2011, we had one programmer and two system administrators and me,” Mr. Martin explained. “It was kind of a rough time, and I was like, ‘If Reddit needs me to move out to San Francisco, I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever Reddit needs. I can’t let this fail.’”

Mr. Martin agreed to move to San Francisco at the behest of Condé, and took on the general manager role. He began to grow the team, hiring a handful of programmers to administer the site. Finally, in September 2011, the company spun Reddit out of the Condé Nast family into its own standalone subsidiary, while still retaining ownership.

“We don’t want to get in users’ way,” Ms. Donlin explained. “We want to serve what the community is already doing. Condé Nast understood that, and it’s why we’re independent. They understood that we needed to be able to do that in order to grow. And they realized in the current structure of Condé Nast, it wasn’t as easy to [grow] because there wasn’t a precedent that was set. We’re more bottom up whereas Condé is more top down.”

Mr. Martin agreed. “The process didn’t allow for [what Reddit needed], that was the main tension. [Condé’s] process is set up for sales cycles that take longer and there’s more sort of time for that kind of vetting and decision-making. But most of the Condé brands have more people on the sales side than we have total employees.”

Reddit hired its first-ever CEO in March 2012, an ex-Pay Pal and Facebook engineer named Yishan Wong. Now, Reddit is a subsidiary of Advance, separate from Condé, and reports to a board populated with executives from both Condé and Advance, along with Mr. Ohanian. “We’ve been working with Advance Publications to complete [R]eddit’s spinoff,” Mr. Wong wrote in a triumphant blog post on Reddit, “[including] a revamped capital structure that will allow [R]eddit to manage its own finances and operations.”

“The way that the site works,” said Kevin Morris, a staff writer at the Daily Dot, in a recent PBS segment about Reddit, “[is that] it tends to attract people who want to know the truth.” In January 2012, the Reddit community’s large-scale vocalization of their opposition to SOPA and PIPA, coupled with support from equally passionate communities on Tumblr and Wikipedia, eventually persuaded lawmakers to table the legislation. Reddit, an online community that had only been around for six years, had successfully helped to defeat the American government.

IN APRIL 2012, MUCH to his surprise, Mr. Martin was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people. For the event, Mr. Martin donned a tuxedo for only the second time ever—the first being a friend’s wedding—and completed the outfit with a shiny pair of Reddit cuff links.

“It was very surreal,” he confided a few weeks after the event. “I’ve never been to something like that. I got to meet Ralph Nader, who is adorable. He asked about Reddit and I explained it to him, but I don’t know if I was successful.”

Mr. Martin is unfailingly humble about his contributions to Reddit. “Any credit I would get,” he said, “would be for not fucking it up.”

“At Reddit, he doesn’t say, ‘Hey, check me out,’” explained Nils Olsen, an old friend of Mr. Martin’s. “He says, ‘Hey, check you out.”

“He can be very humble,” agreed Ms. Donlin. “That humbleness has also been what’s made him so successful.”

Mr. Martin will be moving back to New York in July to focus on the business and media aspects of the site and to run the New York office.

As for that TIME 100 award, it doesn’t appear to have gone to his head.

“Ralph Nader went to give me his business card and he said, ‘Well, I kind of ran out of my current cards, but I grabbed this stack of cards from the 1970s.’ All it had was a P.O. box. It didn’t have a phone number, so he scribbled it on the back,” he said.

“I was like aaahhhh, I am framing this! It was amazing.”

That sounded like an upvote.

A version of this story appeared in the New York Observer the week of Wednesday, June 13th.