(Photo: Comicbook.com)

William Shatner, the Priceline spokesperson best known for his timeless role as the sexy/fearless/fearlessly sexy Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek, recently joined Reddit. And, as happens with many Reddit newbies, he has been immediately sucked in, perhaps to the point of obsession. In fact, dear Mr. Shatner appears to be spending a not insignificant amount of his precious time arguing with people on Reddit. Stars: they're just like us!

Mr. Shatner made the tech press a couple weeks back with his impassioned discussion of the darker side of Reddit, including the casual racism and misogyny that permeates subreddits large and small. "Reddit has been the first ‘mainstream’ site that I have been to that actually appears to allow racists and other hate mongers to group, congregate, incite and spread their hatred," he wrote shortly after joining.

A review of his username page reveals that Mr. Shatner hasn't quit there. He's been spending an awful lot of time in r/StarTrek, r/SciFi and r/Entertainment arguing with fellow Redditors.

When, for example, Mr. Shatner posted a video to several subreddits that showed his Priceline costar Kaley Cuoco in a series of outtakes, many Redditors took issue with his flagrant self-promotion, saying the video was sponsored by Priceline. "Oh OK. Where's the logo? It's a ridiculous assertion," he shot back. "So going on your logic then the ISS video I posted on my phone call to the ISS was sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency? Or maybe Priceline is now offering rooms on the ISS so that was just a 30 minute infomercial?"

The entire comment thread has since been deleted, but evidence of Mr. Shatner's love of arguing with people on the web still lives on in his Reddit user profile:

I keep oscillating back and forth wondering if people do this for karma, cruelty or ignorance. Thank you for the article. I did read it but if you go look I'm not here to do an AMA. I answered the Duck/Horse question that is the only question that seems to count....

So this is what you (colloquially not specifically) are afraid of? An actor not wanting to answer your horse/duck questions and wanting to promote their movie? ;-)

For the record, Mr. Shatner said he wouldn't fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses.

(Photo: Imgur)

It’s no secret that Reddit, the link-sharing site that members tout as a bastion of free speech and creativity, also serves as a seedy showcase of the sexism, racism and misogyny that’s always existed on the web. Reddit has a long history of publicly grappling with its dueling reputations: on the surface, it's a knowledge-sharing platform that even the President has deemed worthy of his presence.

But the site has also battled to suppress some of its more hateful communities while toeing the free speech party line. Last year's Violentacrez scandal, in which Gawker outed one of the site's most notorious trolls for moderating the controversial subreddits r/Jailbait and r/Creepshots, exposed much of what Reddit admins gloss over in favor of inspiring "free and open Internet" rhetoric. In short: Reddit, much like a lot of the Internet, is still a pretty difficult place to be a woman.

Communities like r/Doppelbangher don't make it any easier. The subreddit, which has over 8,000 subscribers, allows users to submit photos of celebrities and--more typically--users' friends so that others can find their porn star lookalikes. It seems kind of harmless at first: sure, we totally get why it might be funny in a weird way to find your porn doppelganger. But the majority of photos appear to come from male redditors looking to find porn lookalikes for women they know, whose photos they've used without their permission. Creepy.

Of course, like most of Reddit, the subreddit discourages the outing of personal information. "If you are going to post a Facebook pic make sure the girl in the picture can't be traced back," reads the subreddit's sidebar. But just because the women in the photos are anonymous, doesn't mean they appreciate cropping up on a subreddit like r/Doppelbangher.

One female Reddit user found her photo on the site and was so incensed she created a throwaway account, "wtfisthisbull," in order to respond. In response to the post, "[REQUEST] Friend from high school," which asked for users to submit porn lookalikes for her photo, the woman posted a photo of herself holding up the sign, "You're disgusting." The user deleted his original post, but not before being shamed out of the subreddit.

Vengeance is sweet, sure, but the existence of r/Doppelbangher speaks to a deeper pattern of casual misogyny and disrespect that permeates the site, one so obvious that even former Starfleet captains take issue with it. "I am apalled [sic] by some of the immature, horrifically racist, sexist, homophobic, ethnic… etc.. posts that are just ignored [on Reddit]," William Shatner wrote in a post to r/StarTrek this weekend. "Reddit has been the first ‘mainstream’ site that I have been to that actually appears to allow racists and other hate mongers to group, congregate, incite and spread their hatred. There’s entire subreddits that allow it."

(Photo: Wikipedia)

There's no room for bigotry on the bridge ... or in online communities, new redditor William Shatner said in a series of comments in the "Star Trek" subreddit: "The fact that someone could come here, debase and degrade people based on race, religion, ethnicity or sexual preference because they ‘have a right’ to do so without worry of any kind of moderation is sending the wrong message, in my humble opinion." [PandoDaily]

NASA's rover Curiosity drilled into a rock bed on Mars in search of water-deposited minerals, and there are photos. [Discovery]

Automaker Lincoln spent lavishly to help Beck record an old David Bowie number: "If this is what you guys are talking about when you talk about 'native ads,' then okay." [AllThingsD]

Several journalists who cover Myanmar, including a correspondent for the Associated Press, received warnings from Google that their Gmail accounts might have been hacked by "state-sponsored attackers." [NYT]

Here is an infographic that wants to help you defuse Internet trolls. Good luck with that. [Mashable]

Are you underwhelmed by the traffic to your carefully manicured Wikipedia page? Two ideas that might help jump your bio to the most widely-read entries: Perform during the Super Bowl halftime show, or drop dead. [Gizmodo]

Groupon has fallen hard since it was the "fastest-growing company in the world" with a valuation of $25 billion, thanks to revelations of accounting discrepancies, revenue numbers, payouts to early investors and a class action lawsuit by employees. Groupon already looks overvalued at its current $10 billion valuation, says Henry Blodget, who estimates a more appropriate valuation would be in the $7.5 billion range in a post titled, "I Wouldn't Touch Groupon's Stock At The IPO Price With A 50-Foot Pole."

Bummerzone for Andrew Mason. But there may be some Groupon backlash backlash. "But just for the sake of symmetry, here’s a simple bull case for Groupon, and for how it could get its really high revenue growth back," writes the highly-regarded Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon this morning.

Now that Groupon has a massive subscriber list, he writes, the company can stop trying to sign up new customers and move on to more creative models of monetization: impulse buys, high-priced goods, travel deals. "Groupon could easily become as valuable as, say, Priceline, which has a market capitalization of $24 billion," Mr. Salmon writes. "If you look at the size of the customer base, and the loyalty of those customers, it’s hard to make a case that a mature Priceline is five times more valuable than a mature Groupon. After all, Priceline is much more constrained in what it sells than Groupon is, and it reaches fewer people."

Interesting that Mr. Salmon compares Groupon to Priceline, which was flying high with a valuation about equal to that of the entire airline industry, opened on the NASDAQ at $16 and closed at $69 despite losing money every quarter except one. But when the market crashed and burned in 2001, Priceline was nearly delisted.

We weren't just scaling back, slowing down, or doing more layoffs. The site was to be shut down that night. The next morning Jay Walker, founder of Priceline.com, gave an emotional talk to a rather shocked staff and tried to convey that we hadn't failed. He stressed that we had a real business with real customers, but had simply run out of money," says Guise, who was one of the first of five Wharton alums to start at WebHouse Club, a separate company and privately-held licensee of Priceline.com. "What was devastating was that I felt like we were just about to turn the corner of success." [employee account in Wharton Magazine]

Luckily the company pivoted, hired a new CEO and executed a 6:1 reverse stock split, recovering in less than two years. More struggles followed--its Better Business Bureau delisting mirrors Groupon's public relations problems with unhappy merchants and overworked employees. It's odd how parallel the two companies' stories are. But now we know what Groupon has to do to break out of its slump: kill that annoying cat and hire William Shatner.