With Galton’s experiment in mind, a purely democratic content curation system seems like a wonderful idea. By allowing every member of the Reddit community to not only contribute content but also vote on content, you will, in theory, harness the power of the group’s collective knowledge and receive excellent content in exchange -- Better content than any individual could curate, in fact. Thousands upon thousands of people have to approve of a single piece of content for it to reach the front page of Reddit. But take a visit to Reddit and you might have a hard time conceding that the content you see on the front page is the culmination of the everymans’ collective genius. What you will find is a wall of cat pictures, bold white text covered memes, and the occasional link to a news story. What’s going on? Does Reddit’s homepage truly represent a superior, group aggregated mass of content?

No. As it turns out, capturing the wisdom of a crowd only works in very specific situations. The conditions have to be perfect. Crowd wisdom doesn't work when the participants create the questions. Crowd wisdom doesn't work when the ‘goodness’ of an answer cannot be evaluated by a simple result. And crowd wisdom doesn't work when the pursuit is creativity. In other words, ask a crowd to guess the amount of jelly beans in a jar and they'll do phenomenally, but ask a crowd to create entertainment, art, or ‘The Front Page of the Internet’ and you’re bound for mediocrity, at best.

"If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people [creating the content] and making ourselves into idiots." - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism: The Hazards of New Online Collectivism)

Large democratic content services like Reddit rarely create any kind of crowd wisdom — rarely create meaningful and powerful content, because everything that reaches the top must first be filtered through a strainer of popular opinion. Content with sharp edges is blunted and you're left with the dull middle bits. Polarizing submissions are not seen because they get caught in the crossfire between approval and disapproval, upvote and downvote. Controversial content is the most interesting content, but it cannot thrive in an environment where the curating element, the upvote, is almost universally used as a “like”. The democratic structure of Reddit -- the stranger-submitted content voted on by strangers -- ensures that what you're seeing and voting on is not, in fact, the ‘Front Page of the Internet’, but an ugly portrait of the site’s 10.3 million users. What reaches the top is generally a concoction of the site’s largely 25-35 year olds’ -- 72% men -- interests and a strong dose of self affirmation.

Experienced ‘Redditors’ should be quick to point out that using the front page of Reddit as an example is misleading. Reddit has thousands upon thousands of individual “subreddits” that focus on specific topics. For example, there’s a Dr. Who subreddit, a World News subreddit, and a StarCraft subreddit. Some subreddits, like ‘Pics’ and ‘Funny’ are enormous and feature content that’s nearly indistinguishable from the kind of content you find on the front page. Others are small, like ‘Castles’ and ‘Madisonwi’, and can sometimes manage to sequester themselves from the masses of the site long enough to develop a completely unique subreddit culture. They might establish strict posting rules with judicious moderators to enforce them, or they might create etiquette concerning what justifies a downvote . And sometimes this works to keep most of Reddit’s culture from permeating into their submissions and discussions, but the structure of content submission and content voting remains the same. Complete strangers that hold no similarities outside of regularly visiting the same incredibly popular website and being interest in the same topic actively sort what information will be most visible.

The takeaway for content consumers is that it’s your responsibility to take control of what your content sources are. Choose content sources with a variety of viewpoints and content sources that sometimes produce pieces you totally disagree with. Choose content sources with accountability, with a face and a name that can be held responsible for all of the great and terrible things they share. When you allow the source of your content to be a faceless mob that you have little in common with outside of your choice aggregator you cheat yourself out of an enormous range of perspectives.

*I want to note how badly I wanted to use the word “alienating” in the headline. It didn't fit so you'll have to suffer the pun down here