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Can Reddit interview presidential candidates better than traditional media?

77 points by steven 11y ago

eldude 11y ago
No. Reddit's user base is extremely liberal and hostile to conservative candidates and values as evident by the echo-chamber that is /r/politics, which fails to meaningfully support pro-conservative news. There are literally no pro-conservative and no anti-liberal top posts from the past month[1], only libertarian, liberal and anti-conservative. The paradigm or technology platform dramatically favors a very specific demographic, and is ultimately a disservice to democracy by disproportionately favoring that demographic's POV. If you fall into that demographic, I imagine it would be very difficult to resist the potential power play to further your own views. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/ http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/ EDIT #1: Okay, /r/politics is a US-only forum. Supporting facts updated. EDIT #2: As a final point, being global in nature, Reddit will always encourage an english-speaking non-US-centric world-oriented political-view. This is precisely, as a nation, what we don't want, to provide a global avenue for anti-US political subversion masquerading as populace rhetoric.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  "Realty has a known liberal basis". All joking aside, I don't think conservative candidates would get a fair shake, but only because their ideas are so far divorced from what younger Americans think of as values. Younger Americans ("Millennials") who have been through the crucible of the latest economic recession are going to be proponents of a strong social safety net, while older voters who lived through the most prosperous of American times will simply say "Bootstraps!" (even though those very same 65+ voters are the ones who will extract more from social security than they've contributed, owning to longer life expectancies and the current biomedical revolution). Younger Americans are more likely to vote in favor of policies supporting same sex marriage and the legalization of Marijuana (neither which infringe on the rights of others, may I add). I know older Americans who are still opposed to interracial marriage. I don't have time at the moment to continue with examples, but as I mentioned above, I think conservative candidates would get skewered in a forum where you can't outright lie, as you'll be fact checked immediately through publicly available data sources. "Gallup: Americans Continue to Shift Left on Key Moral Issues" http://www.gallup.com/poll/183413/americans-continue-shift-left-key-moral-issues.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/183413/americans-continue-shift-l... "Americans are more likely now than in the early 2000s to find a variety of behaviors morally acceptable, including gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage and sex between an unmarried man and woman. Moral acceptability of many of these issues is now at a record-high level." "Moral acceptance of divorce and stem cell research has also jumped by 12 points, reaching 71 percent and 64 percent respectively. By slightly lesser margins, Americans have also grown more accepting of issues such as polygamy and cloning humans. Still, these issues are seen as morally acceptable by less than one-sixth of the population." "Americans are becoming more liberal on social issues, as evidenced not only by the uptick in the percentage describing themselves as socially liberal, but also by their increasing willingness to say that a number of previously frowned-upon behaviors are morally acceptable. The biggest leftward shift over the past 14 years has been in attitudes toward gay and lesbian relations, from only a minority of Americans finding it morally acceptable to a clear majority finding it acceptable."
  - jerf 11y ago
    With all due respect, you appear to have 100% consumed your understanding of the conservative position through liberals describing it to you, and appear to know basically nothing about their actual positions or arguments. Yes, they have them. If that's a shock to you, or you think that no they don't because hurr hurr they're too dumb, well, that would further prove my point. Yes, they definitely exist. (I'm not a conservative in the modern political sense, but I'm also not a liberal. You are greatly less informed about your options than you think you are.)
    - wtallis 11y ago
      Are you actually contending that the views imputed to conservatives by toomuchtodo are not widespread, or are you just invoking a No True Scotsman fallacy by saying that those views shouldn't count despite their prevalence because they fall outside of the lines you want to draw?
      - jerf 11y ago
        I'm contending exactly what I'm contending, that his understanding quite clearly comes from liberals telling him what conservatives think. The summary is basically "not even wrong". Arguing about "what conservatism is" would be an uninteresting sideshow. If you think that's an accurate summary of the conservative position, then you too appear to have gotten your understanding of conservative positions from liberals describing them to you. I'm not expecting to meet many conservatives on HN. I don't expect anyone here to agree very much with them. That would be silly, as I myself don't in many ways. But I believe in condemning things for what they are, not what we can caricature them to be.
        wtallis 11y ago
        I don't see that comment as trying to be an accurate summary of what conservatives stand for in the US, just highlighting a few prominent issues that are sufficient to illustrate why the ideological split is so divisive. An exhaustive or more representative listing including things that are less controversial or that conservatives and liberals agree on would be pretty irrelevant because they're not enough to outweigh the strong differences in opinion on the hot-button issues. Simply leaving out the good bits doesn't make a portrayal a caricature unless it's exaggerating the bad bits. So it really does matter what your take is on the validity of the claims that were made, not just your opinion on what other claims should have been made.
- clavalle 11y ago
  It just takes one user to ask a good question. Besides, Reddit is just one echo chamber of many. And there are plenty of smaller echo chambers within reddit which boasts some pretty large conservative communities of different stripes -- especially Libertarian and AnCaps.
  - ohitsdom 11y ago
    The "just takes one" argument doesn't work on reddit because if the one question goes against the hive mind, it gets downvoted into oblivion and will likely never be seen in the AMA.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  > No. Reddit's user base is extremely liberal and hostile to conservative candidates and values as evident by the echo-chamber that is /r/politics > which fails to meaningfully report on pro-conservative news like the recent Conservative Party win in GB. /r/politics Rule #1 - Articles must deal explicitly with US politics. Given you mean: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/world/europe/david-cameron-and-conservatives-emerge-victorious-in-british-election.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/world/europe/david-cameron... "Great Britain" is not the 51st State of the US, just fyi. It appears you are showing a lack of reading comprehension and fundamental ignorance of the purpose of /r/politics and then using it to make accusations. This being the case, you are a prime example of what any reasonable person would consider someone with an extremely strong bias that colors your viewpoint. You are exactly what you accuse Reddit and /r/politics of being, except Conservative, yet failing to realize the fact you are so biased you assume the basic requirement of a discussion being "on topic" is evidence of bias.
  - eldude 11y ago
    Easy. Tone down the hostility and thanks for proving my point. Despite my ignorance WRT non-US posts, a quick glance at the top /r/politics stories from the past month[1] displays the bias I mention: there is literally not a single pro-conservative post, only libertarian, liberal and anti-conservative posts. It's not my intent to prove anything however, so lack of facts to support doesn't disprove my opinion either. I posted to have a discussion, not whatever you're trying to have. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/ http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/
    - wtallis 11y ago
      How is he in any way proving your point? He provided no evidence regarding the prevalence of conservative viewpoints on Reddit. His hostility—to the extent that it is at all acceptable in a forum like this one—is justified by how simple and shallow your factual mistake was without needing an element of partisan bias.
      - eldude 11y ago
- wtallis 11y ago
  /r/politics is a forum for US politics. They wouldn't normally report on UK politics regardless of which party it was about, unless it had meaningful implications for US politics. I don't think Reddit as a platform inherently appeals more to younger or more liberal users. I think it's just that users who pre-date the Web are less likely to become active participants. A generation from now when even the older part of the population has been using the Web forever, the relative appeal of forums like Reddit to those of different ideologies won't be correlated at all with technology and will be all about social factors in those specific communities.
  - dageshi 11y ago
    /r/ukpolitics and /r/unitedkingdom have essentially split into right/left focused subs. /r/unitedkingdom isn't really intended to be a political sub but in practice it 80% is and is largely on the left. /r/ukpolitics is explicitly political and tends to lean towards the right although you'll certainly find left wing discussion there it'll just tend to be drowned out somewhat.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  To address your completely re-written post: > No. Reddit's user base is extremely liberal and hostile to conservative candidates and values as evident by the echo-chamber that is /r/politics, which fails to meaningfully support pro-conservative news. There are literally no pro-conservative and no anti-liberal top posts from the past month[1], only libertarian, liberal and anti-conservative. The paradigm or technology platform dramatically favors a very specific demographic, and is ultimately a disservice to democracy by disproportionately favoring that demographic's POV. If you fall into that demographic, I imagine it would be very difficult to resist the potential power play to further your own views. I'll address it here as I did in my other post... 1) If you feel libertarians are not "conservatives" it is because you are a social conservative. Yes, Reddit is not friendly to social conservatives but that is really the only bias you've presented. Fiscal conservatism is a libertarian belief, a conservative belief, and is represented by the positive news about Rand Paul. 2) > There are literally no pro-conservative and no anti-liberal top posts from the past month[1] > [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/ http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/ That doesn't demonstrate the bias you claim as it is based on overall score including time in the ranking algorithm. You can see it by the order its displayed on the page. Result #4? 2794 which is greater than results #2 & #3. The correct link would be: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/?sort=top&t=month https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/?sort=top&t=month :/ Like, I get you are trying at this point but its really hard to be nice to someone who seems only interested in attempting to misrepresent the facts to fit his world view. I even had to correct the link you offered because the link you presented this time still doesn't match the statement you made. Do you even understand the problem I have with you is: 1) You make conservatives look bad by being this ignorant. 2) You are painting me as a "hostile liberal" when my problem with you is the fact you have a fact-free opinion of the world and actively misrepresent and completely rewrite your posts to remove those misrepresentations? > EDIT #2: As a final point, being global in nature, Reddit will always encourage an english-speaking non-US-centric world-oriented political-view. This is precisely, as a nation, what we don't want, to provide a global avenue for anti-US political subversion masquerading as populace rhetoric. Populist rhetoric isn't inherently "subversive". The fact you are convinced that Reddit is an avenue for "anti-US political rhetoric" means you frankly don't understand the value and purpose of the 1st amendment. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" The right to exercise political speech is a fundamental right both for Americans and everyone else in the world under the Constitution. The fact you would go against that makes you: 1) Un-American. 2) Not-A-Conservative. Protecting constitutional rights is a fundamental conservative belief. If you are opposed to people exercising a fundamental constitution right, such as the freedom of speech, you are a horrible American. 3) You are precisely why the Constitution exists. To protect the rest of us from people who think the ability to have an honest, public conservation about political views is a bad thing. You do realize that is a large part of why we revolted against the British in the first place, right? An inability to influence politics legally via speech and parliamentary representation? EDIT: Sean I get rate limited in these threads and can't reply. Anyway, I read the "as a nation" bit as policy advocacy. Maybe that wasn't his intent but that seems to have been his way of phrasing that intent previously.
clavalle 11y ago
Here's the thing about traditional journalists and their organizations: they have to maintain a relationship with these people. If they ask hard questions that might make the candidates look bad they don't get invited back or pay other access penalties. Random people don't suffer from this problem. But they also don't generally have the inside knowledge to ask the real questions. Solution: anonymize the professional journalists and their organizations. No one to blame, no one to retaliate against.
- wtallis 11y ago
  > "But they also don't generally have the inside knowledge to ask the real questions." What do you mean by this? That Reddit can't do what Woodward and Bernstein did?
  - clavalle 11y ago
    You might get people who intimately know an issue from reddit, but they won't know the politics or political players as well. Also, if you do get someone that intimately knows an issue from reddit it is likely from a very personal point of view. Sometimes that's not a problem but you'd have to really think about how their personal agenda colors the question...with strangers this is not always clear. Professional journalists are supposed to be somewhat removed which provides useful perspective -- or at least a perspective that is more generally applicable. So, no, they wouldn't be able to do what Woodward and Bernstein did. BUT they could offer valuable insight and perspective that contributes to the whole that would be hard to fish out any other way so I definitely wouldn't dismiss them.
- SapphireSun 11y ago
  That's an interesting idea. How would you get a candidate to agree to an anonymous interview though? EDIT: One way to take the pressure off is to tell the candidate, your interviewer will be one of these people but we won't tell you which one. However, I think they truly value the ability to retaliate so that is probably not enough. EDIT 2: Also, anonymizing journalists deprives them of the credit they'd get from a tough interview. While I imagine many would participate out of civic duty, they'd really like to be able to get (timely) credit without being retaliated against.
hackuser 11y ago
Someone once said that you can fool some of the people all the time and you can fool all the people some of the time. The crowds can be fooled; worse, when they insist on something that isn't true, almost every public figure will give in and tell the people what they want to hear. Generally I'm more interested in questions from people who study these issues full-time, and are skilled at handling the evasiveness (and sometimes plain old deceit) of public figures. The wisdom of the crowds is a great tool, but like all great tools it's not a universal one. It doesn't replace expertise, for example. I don't want my medical condition treated or my war planned by amateurs. The public figures are professionals at this PR game. That said, the crowd-based interview may complement the professionals.
- jordanpg 11y ago
  I cannot agree more. The manner in which voting decisions are ostensibly supposed to be made can only be called juvenile. The questions in play are among the most complex in human history. The stakes are high. All the way high. And still decisions about how to vote are supposed to be determined by bland, simple answers to vague, generalized questions? No thanks; please just show me the analysis. Show me the graphs. Show me the track record, in writing. I care little for what politicians or their PR wings say to interviewers. I care lots about data. Aside: it's up to us (techy people), in my opinion, to find a way to jump-start this discourse.
  - fleitz 11y ago
    A big part of the problem is we don't know what we even want from democracy. eg. Is the idea to select leaders who know better than us, so that policy reflects the views of the public, etc? I'm pretty sure what actually results is not unlike Douglas Adams feelings on democracy, that we mostly vote for one lizard so another lizard doesn't get elected.
    - mooreds 11y ago
      Yes, the fundamental question is do we want a trustee or delegate form of democracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegate_model_of_representation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegate_model_of_representatio...
TeMPOraL 11y ago
No surprises here. Reddit can do quite a lot of things better than traditional media. So can bloggers (if you filter out the major part of the blogosphere, which now is another money making machine). Basically, people genuinely, intrinsically caring about a particular thing will produce better results than people pushing agendas and using that thing as a tool to get money and further careers.
btilly 11y ago
The answer is yes. The forum is not trying to channel the conversation through a pre-determined dialog. Likewise a website is able to do a better job of figuring out who you should vote for than listening to campaign ads. In the last several elections I've used http://www.selectsmart.com/president/ http://www.selectsmart.com/president/ as a starting point for figuring out who I support.
- kissickas 11y ago
  To provide another implementation, I prefer http://www.isidewith.com/political-quiz http://www.isidewith.com/political-quiz as it's more issue-based and you don't need to know the stances of the organizations mentioned in the selectsmart quiz.
  - btilly 11y ago
    I like the fact that selectsmart ranks each possible candidate, and not just general parties. For example in 2008 there were significant policy differences between Obama and Clinton. And I wanted to know who I sided with in the primary.
pdovy 11y ago
The quality of the questions on Bernie Sanders' AMA were pretty good, but it was informative only because he didn't shy away from answering the interesting questions. One of the Chicago Mayoral candidates did an AMA in the recent election and it was pretty abysmal. The good questions were skipped and the other answers were evasive. In that respect, Reddit lacks something an in-person interview can deliver (with a good interviewer) - the ability to push back on a non-answer and not be ignored. You also can't catch someone off guard on Reddit, really - the answers are going to be very carefully curated.
- wtallis 11y ago
  So a really interesting question would be: can a candidate who is unafraid to answer questions honestly compete well against a field of candidates who try to only tell people what they want to hear? Is it possible to change the game such that not alienating anyone is less of a priority? EDIT: Thinking about this more, it may be important that we play multiple iterations of this game. During primaries, candidates are much less concerned about alienating voters from the other party, and are much more concerned about straying from the positions mandated by their party base. In the general election, they often have the opposite incentive. If we only had one round of campaigning, it could be much easier for candidates to delineate their true beliefs, though whatever voting system was used would still be vulnerable to some form of strategy.
  - jordanpg 11y ago
    In principle, yes, but not when the means of media distribution (campaign ads, debates, etc.) are controlled by parties with obvious conflicts of interest. In other words, the debates will always be pathetic so long as they are run by companies like FOX, NPR, and NBC. Companies with plain political interests. This, more than anything else, needs disrupting.
- vijayr 11y ago
  Reddit should implement some kind of "AMA score" for every AMA. Those that evade questions, give vague answers etc will get a lower score and their future AMAs won't generate that much interest.
kenbellows 11y ago
I'd be very interested to see a sort of combination of these approaches, wherein questions are submitted in advance and upvoted/downvoted to determine priority, then the top x questions are asked and the answers discussed by a live interviewer. This would eliminate some (not all) of the problems that @pdovy points out while keeping the positive aspects of a crowd-curated set of questions.

77 points by steven 11y ago

No. Reddit's user base is extremely liberal and hostile to conservative candidates and values as evident by the echo-chamber that is /r/politics, which fails to meaningfully support pro-conservative news. There are literally no pro-conservative and no anti-liberal top posts from the past month[1], only libertarian, liberal and anti-conservative. The paradigm or technology platform dramatically favors a very specific demographic, and is ultimately a disservice to democracy by disproportionately favoring that demographic's POV. If you fall into that demographic, I imagine it would be very difficult to resist the potential power play to further your own views. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/ http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/ EDIT #1: Okay, /r/politics is a US-only forum. Supporting facts updated. EDIT #2: As a final point, being global in nature, Reddit will always encourage an english-speaking non-US-centric world-oriented political-view. This is precisely, as a nation, what we don't want, to provide a global avenue for anti-US political subversion masquerading as populace rhetoric.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
"Realty has a known liberal basis". All joking aside, I don't think conservative candidates would get a fair shake, but only because their ideas are so far divorced from what younger Americans think of as values. Younger Americans ("Millennials") who have been through the crucible of the latest economic recession are going to be proponents of a strong social safety net, while older voters who lived through the most prosperous of American times will simply say "Bootstraps!" (even though those very same 65+ voters are the ones who will extract more from social security than they've contributed, owning to longer life expectancies and the current biomedical revolution). Younger Americans are more likely to vote in favor of policies supporting same sex marriage and the legalization of Marijuana (neither which infringe on the rights of others, may I add). I know older Americans who are still opposed to interracial marriage. I don't have time at the moment to continue with examples, but as I mentioned above, I think conservative candidates would get skewered in a forum where you can't outright lie, as you'll be fact checked immediately through publicly available data sources. "Gallup: Americans Continue to Shift Left on Key Moral Issues" http://www.gallup.com/poll/183413/americans-continue-shift-left-key-moral-issues.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/183413/americans-continue-shift-l... "Americans are more likely now than in the early 2000s to find a variety of behaviors morally acceptable, including gay and lesbian relations, having a baby outside of marriage and sex between an unmarried man and woman. Moral acceptability of many of these issues is now at a record-high level." "Moral acceptance of divorce and stem cell research has also jumped by 12 points, reaching 71 percent and 64 percent respectively. By slightly lesser margins, Americans have also grown more accepting of issues such as polygamy and cloning humans. Still, these issues are seen as morally acceptable by less than one-sixth of the population." "Americans are becoming more liberal on social issues, as evidenced not only by the uptick in the percentage describing themselves as socially liberal, but also by their increasing willingness to say that a number of previously frowned-upon behaviors are morally acceptable. The biggest leftward shift over the past 14 years has been in attitudes toward gay and lesbian relations, from only a minority of Americans finding it morally acceptable to a clear majority finding it acceptable."
- jerf 11y ago
  With all due respect, you appear to have 100% consumed your understanding of the conservative position through liberals describing it to you, and appear to know basically nothing about their actual positions or arguments. Yes, they have them. If that's a shock to you, or you think that no they don't because hurr hurr they're too dumb, well, that would further prove my point. Yes, they definitely exist. (I'm not a conservative in the modern political sense, but I'm also not a liberal. You are greatly less informed about your options than you think you are.)
  - wtallis 11y ago
    Are you actually contending that the views imputed to conservatives by toomuchtodo are not widespread, or are you just invoking a No True Scotsman fallacy by saying that those views shouldn't count despite their prevalence because they fall outside of the lines you want to draw?
    - jerf 11y ago
      I'm contending exactly what I'm contending, that his understanding quite clearly comes from liberals telling him what conservatives think. The summary is basically "not even wrong". Arguing about "what conservatism is" would be an uninteresting sideshow. If you think that's an accurate summary of the conservative position, then you too appear to have gotten your understanding of conservative positions from liberals describing them to you. I'm not expecting to meet many conservatives on HN. I don't expect anyone here to agree very much with them. That would be silly, as I myself don't in many ways. But I believe in condemning things for what they are, not what we can caricature them to be.
      - wtallis 11y ago
        I don't see that comment as trying to be an accurate summary of what conservatives stand for in the US, just highlighting a few prominent issues that are sufficient to illustrate why the ideological split is so divisive. An exhaustive or more representative listing including things that are less controversial or that conservatives and liberals agree on would be pretty irrelevant because they're not enough to outweigh the strong differences in opinion on the hot-button issues. Simply leaving out the good bits doesn't make a portrayal a caricature unless it's exaggerating the bad bits. So it really does matter what your take is on the validity of the claims that were made, not just your opinion on what other claims should have been made.
clavalle 11y ago
It just takes one user to ask a good question. Besides, Reddit is just one echo chamber of many. And there are plenty of smaller echo chambers within reddit which boasts some pretty large conservative communities of different stripes -- especially Libertarian and AnCaps.
- ohitsdom 11y ago
  The "just takes one" argument doesn't work on reddit because if the one question goes against the hive mind, it gets downvoted into oblivion and will likely never be seen in the AMA.
fweespeech 11y ago
> No. Reddit's user base is extremely liberal and hostile to conservative candidates and values as evident by the echo-chamber that is /r/politics > which fails to meaningfully report on pro-conservative news like the recent Conservative Party win in GB. /r/politics Rule #1 - Articles must deal explicitly with US politics. Given you mean: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/world/europe/david-cameron-and-conservatives-emerge-victorious-in-british-election.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/09/world/europe/david-cameron... "Great Britain" is not the 51st State of the US, just fyi. It appears you are showing a lack of reading comprehension and fundamental ignorance of the purpose of /r/politics and then using it to make accusations. This being the case, you are a prime example of what any reasonable person would consider someone with an extremely strong bias that colors your viewpoint. You are exactly what you accuse Reddit and /r/politics of being, except Conservative, yet failing to realize the fact you are so biased you assume the basic requirement of a discussion being "on topic" is evidence of bias.
- eldude 11y ago
  Easy. Tone down the hostility and thanks for proving my point. Despite my ignorance WRT non-US posts, a quick glance at the top /r/politics stories from the past month[1] displays the bias I mention: there is literally not a single pro-conservative post, only libertarian, liberal and anti-conservative posts. It's not my intent to prove anything however, so lack of facts to support doesn't disprove my opinion either. I posted to have a discussion, not whatever you're trying to have. [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/ http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/
  - wtallis 11y ago
    How is he in any way proving your point? He provided no evidence regarding the prevalence of conservative viewpoints on Reddit. His hostility—to the extent that it is at all acceptable in a forum like this one—is justified by how simple and shallow your factual mistake was without needing an element of partisan bias.
    - eldude 11y ago
wtallis 11y ago
/r/politics is a forum for US politics. They wouldn't normally report on UK politics regardless of which party it was about, unless it had meaningful implications for US politics. I don't think Reddit as a platform inherently appeals more to younger or more liberal users. I think it's just that users who pre-date the Web are less likely to become active participants. A generation from now when even the older part of the population has been using the Web forever, the relative appeal of forums like Reddit to those of different ideologies won't be correlated at all with technology and will be all about social factors in those specific communities.
- dageshi 11y ago
  /r/ukpolitics and /r/unitedkingdom have essentially split into right/left focused subs. /r/unitedkingdom isn't really intended to be a political sub but in practice it 80% is and is largely on the left. /r/ukpolitics is explicitly political and tends to lean towards the right although you'll certainly find left wing discussion there it'll just tend to be drowned out somewhat.
fweespeech 11y ago
To address your completely re-written post: > No. Reddit's user base is extremely liberal and hostile to conservative candidates and values as evident by the echo-chamber that is /r/politics, which fails to meaningfully support pro-conservative news. There are literally no pro-conservative and no anti-liberal top posts from the past month[1], only libertarian, liberal and anti-conservative. The paradigm or technology platform dramatically favors a very specific demographic, and is ultimately a disservice to democracy by disproportionately favoring that demographic's POV. If you fall into that demographic, I imagine it would be very difficult to resist the potential power play to further your own views. I'll address it here as I did in my other post... 1) If you feel libertarians are not "conservatives" it is because you are a social conservative. Yes, Reddit is not friendly to social conservatives but that is really the only bias you've presented. Fiscal conservatism is a libertarian belief, a conservative belief, and is represented by the positive news about Rand Paul. 2) > There are literally no pro-conservative and no anti-liberal top posts from the past month[1] > [1] http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/ http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/ That doesn't demonstrate the bias you claim as it is based on overall score including time in the ranking algorithm. You can see it by the order its displayed on the page. Result #4? 2794 which is greater than results #2 & #3. The correct link would be: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/?sort=top&t=month https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/top/?sort=top&t=month :/ Like, I get you are trying at this point but its really hard to be nice to someone who seems only interested in attempting to misrepresent the facts to fit his world view. I even had to correct the link you offered because the link you presented this time still doesn't match the statement you made. Do you even understand the problem I have with you is: 1) You make conservatives look bad by being this ignorant. 2) You are painting me as a "hostile liberal" when my problem with you is the fact you have a fact-free opinion of the world and actively misrepresent and completely rewrite your posts to remove those misrepresentations? > EDIT #2: As a final point, being global in nature, Reddit will always encourage an english-speaking non-US-centric world-oriented political-view. This is precisely, as a nation, what we don't want, to provide a global avenue for anti-US political subversion masquerading as populace rhetoric. Populist rhetoric isn't inherently "subversive". The fact you are convinced that Reddit is an avenue for "anti-US political rhetoric" means you frankly don't understand the value and purpose of the 1st amendment. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" The right to exercise political speech is a fundamental right both for Americans and everyone else in the world under the Constitution. The fact you would go against that makes you: 1) Un-American. 2) Not-A-Conservative. Protecting constitutional rights is a fundamental conservative belief. If you are opposed to people exercising a fundamental constitution right, such as the freedom of speech, you are a horrible American. 3) You are precisely why the Constitution exists. To protect the rest of us from people who think the ability to have an honest, public conservation about political views is a bad thing. You do realize that is a large part of why we revolted against the British in the first place, right? An inability to influence politics legally via speech and parliamentary representation? EDIT: Sean I get rate limited in these threads and can't reply. Anyway, I read the "as a nation" bit as policy advocacy. Maybe that wasn't his intent but that seems to have been his way of phrasing that intent previously.

clavalle 11y ago

Here's the thing about traditional journalists and their organizations: they have to maintain a relationship with these people. If they ask hard questions that might make the candidates look bad they don't get invited back or pay other access penalties. Random people don't suffer from this problem. But they also don't generally have the inside knowledge to ask the real questions. Solution: anonymize the professional journalists and their organizations. No one to blame, no one to retaliate against.

wtallis 11y ago
> "But they also don't generally have the inside knowledge to ask the real questions." What do you mean by this? That Reddit can't do what Woodward and Bernstein did?
- clavalle 11y ago
  You might get people who intimately know an issue from reddit, but they won't know the politics or political players as well. Also, if you do get someone that intimately knows an issue from reddit it is likely from a very personal point of view. Sometimes that's not a problem but you'd have to really think about how their personal agenda colors the question...with strangers this is not always clear. Professional journalists are supposed to be somewhat removed which provides useful perspective -- or at least a perspective that is more generally applicable. So, no, they wouldn't be able to do what Woodward and Bernstein did. BUT they could offer valuable insight and perspective that contributes to the whole that would be hard to fish out any other way so I definitely wouldn't dismiss them.
SapphireSun 11y ago
That's an interesting idea. How would you get a candidate to agree to an anonymous interview though? EDIT: One way to take the pressure off is to tell the candidate, your interviewer will be one of these people but we won't tell you which one. However, I think they truly value the ability to retaliate so that is probably not enough. EDIT 2: Also, anonymizing journalists deprives them of the credit they'd get from a tough interview. While I imagine many would participate out of civic duty, they'd really like to be able to get (timely) credit without being retaliated against.

hackuser 11y ago

Someone once said that you can fool some of the people all the time and you can fool all the people some of the time. The crowds can be fooled; worse, when they insist on something that isn't true, almost every public figure will give in and tell the people what they want to hear. Generally I'm more interested in questions from people who study these issues full-time, and are skilled at handling the evasiveness (and sometimes plain old deceit) of public figures. The wisdom of the crowds is a great tool, but like all great tools it's not a universal one. It doesn't replace expertise, for example. I don't want my medical condition treated or my war planned by amateurs. The public figures are professionals at this PR game. That said, the crowd-based interview may complement the professionals.

jordanpg 11y ago
I cannot agree more. The manner in which voting decisions are ostensibly supposed to be made can only be called juvenile. The questions in play are among the most complex in human history. The stakes are high. All the way high. And still decisions about how to vote are supposed to be determined by bland, simple answers to vague, generalized questions? No thanks; please just show me the analysis. Show me the graphs. Show me the track record, in writing. I care little for what politicians or their PR wings say to interviewers. I care lots about data. Aside: it's up to us (techy people), in my opinion, to find a way to jump-start this discourse.
- fleitz 11y ago
  A big part of the problem is we don't know what we even want from democracy. eg. Is the idea to select leaders who know better than us, so that policy reflects the views of the public, etc? I'm pretty sure what actually results is not unlike Douglas Adams feelings on democracy, that we mostly vote for one lizard so another lizard doesn't get elected.
  - mooreds 11y ago
    Yes, the fundamental question is do we want a trustee or delegate form of democracy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegate_model_of_representation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegate_model_of_representatio...

TeMPOraL 11y ago

No surprises here. Reddit can do quite a lot of things better than traditional media. So can bloggers (if you filter out the major part of the blogosphere, which now is another money making machine). Basically, people genuinely, intrinsically caring about a particular thing will produce better results than people pushing agendas and using that thing as a tool to get money and further careers.

btilly 11y ago

The answer is yes. The forum is not trying to channel the conversation through a pre-determined dialog. Likewise a website is able to do a better job of figuring out who you should vote for than listening to campaign ads. In the last several elections I've used http://www.selectsmart.com/president/ http://www.selectsmart.com/president/ as a starting point for figuring out who I support.

kissickas 11y ago
To provide another implementation, I prefer http://www.isidewith.com/political-quiz http://www.isidewith.com/political-quiz as it's more issue-based and you don't need to know the stances of the organizations mentioned in the selectsmart quiz.
- btilly 11y ago
  I like the fact that selectsmart ranks each possible candidate, and not just general parties. For example in 2008 there were significant policy differences between Obama and Clinton. And I wanted to know who I sided with in the primary.

pdovy 11y ago

The quality of the questions on Bernie Sanders' AMA were pretty good, but it was informative only because he didn't shy away from answering the interesting questions. One of the Chicago Mayoral candidates did an AMA in the recent election and it was pretty abysmal. The good questions were skipped and the other answers were evasive. In that respect, Reddit lacks something an in-person interview can deliver (with a good interviewer) - the ability to push back on a non-answer and not be ignored. You also can't catch someone off guard on Reddit, really - the answers are going to be very carefully curated.

wtallis 11y ago
So a really interesting question would be: can a candidate who is unafraid to answer questions honestly compete well against a field of candidates who try to only tell people what they want to hear? Is it possible to change the game such that not alienating anyone is less of a priority? EDIT: Thinking about this more, it may be important that we play multiple iterations of this game. During primaries, candidates are much less concerned about alienating voters from the other party, and are much more concerned about straying from the positions mandated by their party base. In the general election, they often have the opposite incentive. If we only had one round of campaigning, it could be much easier for candidates to delineate their true beliefs, though whatever voting system was used would still be vulnerable to some form of strategy.
- jordanpg 11y ago
  In principle, yes, but not when the means of media distribution (campaign ads, debates, etc.) are controlled by parties with obvious conflicts of interest. In other words, the debates will always be pathetic so long as they are run by companies like FOX, NPR, and NBC. Companies with plain political interests. This, more than anything else, needs disrupting.
vijayr 11y ago
Reddit should implement some kind of "AMA score" for every AMA. Those that evade questions, give vague answers etc will get a lower score and their future AMAs won't generate that much interest.

kenbellows 11y ago

I'd be very interested to see a sort of combination of these approaches, wherein questions are submitted in advance and upvoted/downvoted to determine priority, then the top x questions are asked and the answers discussed by a live interviewer. This would eliminate some (not all) of the problems that @pdovy points out while keeping the positive aspects of a crowd-curated set of questions.