Hats off to Reddit. The amateur Internet detectives on the social news site may not have cracked the Boston Marathon bombing case by any stretch of the imagination, but in the past 24 hours they helped to identify and publicize some important and useful evidence in the face of a growing barrage of criticism from the tech and mainstream press.

Of course, Redditors also served up a couple of regrettable false positives during the dramatic, ongoing manhunt for the bombing suspects. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a gun battle with police last night, and the search continued Friday for his 19-year-old brother and alleged co-conspirator, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Those are the facts and they're important, because Reddit has become an important, if tangential, part of this unfolding story.

Contrary to some of Reddit's fiercest critics in the tech and mainstream press, I think the efforts of many Redditors over the past several days have been largely worthwhile, that the benefits of what they've been doing outweigh the negatives, and that "the most crowdsourced terror investigation in American history," as The Atlantic's Rebecca Greenfield called it, is more important to consider than the results.

Prior to the FBI's release late Thursday of photos and video depicting the bombing suspects, amateur sleuths on Reddit, like so many of their paid brethren in the professional media, largely spun their wheels as they sifted through publicly available photos of the Boston Marathon crowd in their effort to pick out the bombers.

Online sleuths on Reddit and other social sites spent a lot of time obsessing over random people in crowd shots based on the flimsiest of evidence or no evidence at all. In one such case, two innocent men became the subject of heated speculation on the catch-all r/findbostonbombers subreddit. Worse, the pair woke up on Thursday morning to find their faces splashed across the front page of New York Post, which falsely identified the "bag men" the federal authorities were seeking.

But some useful stuff did come out of that process. For example, one r/findbostonbombers subreddit thread was devoted to identifying the precise locations where Monday's bombs went off to reference against other available photographic evidence. Redditors contributing to that effort wound up doing a great job of pinpointing ground zero in the two explosions.

When the FBI did release some images of the alleged bombers, their hard work paid off. It was immediately possible to cross-reference other photos showing the explosion sites to see if either of the two suspects appeared nearby. In fact, one photo surfaced that appeared to show Dzhokhar Tsarnaev standing, with a backpack at his feet, right where the second bomb went off.

After the suspects' photos were released, Redditors ID'd the baseball caps the alleged bombers were wearing within minutes. They also helped circulate a pair of previously unknown photos that appeared to show the two men. One, taken by marathon runner David Green of people fleeing west towards Boston's Fairfield Street away from the explosions, shows a man who appears to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaevprobably the clearest image of him available for several hours on Thursday before the authorities released more photos.

But Reddit also helped to add to the confusion of the past night and day. Before the two ethnic Chechen brothers were named, some amateur sleuths put forward a theory involving a missing university student who bore a passing resemblance to one suspect, leading to a brief flurry of attention the young man's family surely did not welcome. That individual is obviously not a suspect and it's plainly regrettable that his already distraught family had to see his name bandied about as a possible terrorist.

For Greenfield and her Atlantic colleague Alexis Madrigal, in high dudgeon over Reddit "vigilantism" earlier in the week, such unfortunate developments override any benefits crowd-sourced detective projects might provide.

"If you thought the New York Post's 'Bag Men' outing was bad, the most crowd-sourced terror investigation in American history transformed from Internet sleuthing of FBI photos on Thursday night into a lynch mobfrom Reddit to a police scanner to social media and beyondthat led to the outing of even more innocent people as would-be suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing," Greenfield wrote Friday, oddly going on to name the student and another falsely ID'd suspect whose privacy she otherwise says she wants to protect.

"Of course, now we know that neither [of the two misidentified men] are or were the suspects, with authorities pursuing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and ... killing his brother Tamerlan. But the damage ... is already done. ... [T]hese men are just some of the many innocent people who have had their names and details passed around the mainstream media, the Internet, and beyond," she wrote.

Well, it would suck to have your name and details splashed around the Internet when you haven't done anything. It sucks that a family had to deal with several hours of nasty talk about their son. Can't disagree with Greenfield on those points in the slightest.

But it also sucks to have a pair of armed and dangerous killers roaming about the countryside. And it would really suck if someone who had a decent tip or a plausible theory that might help in finding them, sat on it instead of passing it along out of an exaggerated sense of respect for people's privacy.

If you're going to question whether Redditors were out of line to speculate about a theory that proved to be wrong, you might also want to ask about the implications of it being right.

And this is what baffles me the most about the fashionable hostility towards Reddit seeping up through the establishment media floor right now. The FBI, in this very case, specifically asked the public to pass on tips, "no matter how small." Redditors pitching in on this effort have been doing just that and betterthe way the site functions works as a filter for the clearly dumb theories and demonstrably false tips, while pushing the most plausible and useful ones to the forefront (the New York Post and others picking up on already-debunked Reddit speculation can't be laid at the feet of Redditors).

And unfortunately, that process is messy. Are there some cranks and nuts and trolls on Reddit? Sure. Did most of the stuff generated by the Internet sleuths on Reddit prove to be wrong in this case? Yep. Did Reddit even help identify and catch the alleged Boston bombers? Probably notthe alleged bombers appear to have done that all on their own with last night's rampage.

But so what? Future crowd-sourced investigations of this sort will also get a lot of stuff wrong, maybe even everything wrong. But sometimes they'll get some important things right, possibly even right enough to have a real impact on solving a public problem of this nature.

Reddit's critics, however, are setting an impossibly high standard for crowd-sourced detective work. Which seems to be, "Only ever talk about things that wind up being proven true." Good luck with that, folks.

For more, see Did Twitter 'Own' the Boston Story Last Night?

UPDATE: Reddit addressed the controversy surrounding the Internet sleuths who crowd sourced the search for the Boston Marathon bombers in an April 22 blog post, admitting that the effort got out of hand.

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