Introduction

In 2007, I wrote a paper for my 3rd year Women’s Studies class called “Why Are There So Few Women On Digg?” The paper outlined some of my observations about how Digg was a systematically unwelcoming place for women (and other minorities). It also drew on the writings of Clay Shirky and others to make some suggestions about how Digg could change in order to be more welcoming to diversity.

After the class, I opened this WordPress account and posted it online, and shared it on Digg. It didn’t really go anywhere at the time, but a little while later (a few days, iirc) my heart lept into my throat to see my post rocketing up the front page! Top user, mrbabyman, had re-shared the link and guaranteed it a moment of frontpage glory. Now that Digg is gone, I can’t remember how many ‘diggs’ it got, but it was more than 1337 (because I still have the screenshot at that!). The reaction was better than I was expecting. Keep in mind… this was 6 years ago, shortly after Kathy Sierra was receiving death threats for daring to be a woman in technology. I only had a few links-back to my post that rolled their eyes and called me a stupid feminist. Sadly at the time, I missed this awesome link-back from Ryan Block with a great screenshot and analysis of perhaps some of the reasons why…

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I was out for dinner with my now husband (boyfriend in 2007) to celebrate our anniversary when my phone lit up with notifications of comments on something else I had written in 2007 – part of my final paper in Women’s Studies. It had made it to the front page of Reddit, a TIL titled “TIL that Married With…Children was a reactionary TV show meant to contrast The Cosby Show; whereas The Cosbys were the first affluent black loving family on TV, the Bundy’s were the first who were all white, poor and hated each other. In fact, the working title was originally “Not The Cosbys”.

My experience of these two front pages was very different. When my article arrive at Digg, I had pre-braced myself for the worst. I had already turned off commenting, and I ensured there was no trackable information about my identity related to the post or my Digg account. The comments no the Digg post, although not as negative as I was bracing for, had enough ‘made me a sandwich’ and dismissive anti-feminist reaction to confirm my instinct that Digg was not in a place where understanding why being actively antagonistic to women and other minorities was a bad thing.

The morning after my other post so randomly ended up on Reddit, I scoured the comments looking for a similar reaction. More than 45,000 people had visited the site in the last 24 hours, and there were thousands of comments, but I couldn’t find one that was reacting against the ideas of the content of my post. Admittedly, I didn’t delve into comments that were so far nested or buried that they were ‘hidden’, but the immediate reaction was partially people who were reacting to the title (aka didn’t read the actual post), but it was also partially engaged, thoughtful dissections of race, class & gender. I was impressed, and it got me thinking: what has changed since 2007? What is different between Digg & Reddit?

To be honest, since this experience I have properly started using Reddit (although I actually joined for the first time just a few months ago…). I was curious to see if this was a one off, or if I stuck around for a bit I would experience the same feeling of being fed up with the content and comments that ultimately led me to stop checking Digg (long after I wrote that essay…!).

I have been excited and impressed to see the depth of thought and the level of respect with which the communities on Reddit handle things. I know that there are deep, dark parts of Reddit that will completely ruin my perception of this, but things that make the generic frontpage, and things that are generally getting posted do not reflect this. The front-page customization feature is also pretty wicked, although I do recall Digg did kind of have a similar thing to this as well, although it was much more rigid and I think came after 2007.

My instinct is, as I will discuss more below, is that while these articles are very different there are many ways that Reddit is a better place for women than Digg, and a lot of them reflect the initial recommendations I made on my Digg essay back in 2007.

What I initially called for as a way of making space for women

1. Create a better, more inclusive space

Then, and now, I rejected the idea that this should mean creating a separate a woman only space, but I did note that there were parts of the web that claimed more equal gender balance despite being academic or intellectual or technology-focused spaces, and that there might be something structural to them that was different to change this. Ultimately this wasn’t my preferred choice, as Digg was a good idea. Reddit, as it turns out, might be exactly what I couldn’t even dream of at the time…

2. Recruit more women

Well this one turned out maybe to be a bad assumption… as this infographic from mediabistro claims Reddit is still 74% male, although this one only two months later on royal.pingdom.com claims closer to 65%.

I am planning to post this in the TwoXChromosome subreddit, where I assume those numbers would be skewed in the other direction. Perhaps this is an interesting point, that although it makes the inclusionist in me cringe, maybe creating a space that is women-focused to stand together and find each other in a male-dominated space is, still, important. (Take that, post-feminist believers!)

Also, as I pointed out back then:

[This] also assumes that women will perpetuate sexism, racism and homophobia less than men, which may well not be the case.

3. Fight back strategically

In this, I called on a number of strategies for doing this, the first being ‘picking your battles.’ Here is a quote I originally included in my article:

“Attitudes toward women have improved dramatically just in my lifetime, but still the world has too many misogynists, and the Web has given them a microphone that lets them turn up the volume on their quavering selves, their self-righteous fury, their self-loathing expressed as hatred of women. And yet, mostly, women on the Web just have to ignore it. If you show it bothers you, you’ve given them pleasure. Life is too short to think about… trolls” (2007). [Walsh, Joan. 2007.“Men who hate women on the web.” Retrieved April 9, 2007.]

I noted that ‘blocking’ users was one way of ensuring people who are jerks no longer get your time of day without giving them the satisfaction of seeing their trolling be validated.

I also suggested seeking out like-minded users to help draw attention to posts or comments that were particularly lacking in thoughtful deconstruction and intersectional thinking, rather than be defeated because your one downvote would do nothing. In a way, I can see already that Reddit is much better at discoverability of like-mindedness than Digg ever was! I have already ‘friended’ a few people because I could see that they ‘upvoted’ my comments and that we had similar interests. Subreddits help with this, too, as I can focus in on some incredibly rich and specific topics while still keeping the front page pretty generic.

4. Increase accountability

This is one that is frequently discussed as a barrier to online interactions: a disconnection that leads to mean and hateful comments that many people would never say in real life, or to someone’s face.

I originally wrote:

In a community as large as digg it is difficult to foster the connection between people that exists in face to face interaction, but there are core users that have more influence than casual members. [Shirky, Clay. 2003. “A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy.” Retrieved April 9, 2007.] As with the bloggers who rejected the code of conduct recently suggested by O’Reilly and Wales I am hesitant to advocate censorship. …. Shirky argues that there has to be some sort of agreed upon set of rules or code of conduct in place in large groups in order to protect themselves from self-destructing due to their size (2003). This has to be a collective decision as well as a personal one, but until some sort of internal standard for behaviour is in place there is little impetus for members to think about how their comment contributes to the larger discussion.

I think Reddit “karma” is a brilliant way of tackling this problem! The very notion of Karma is an eloquent solution to solve the diffused sense of community across a large and fragmented online space. I often ponder if sites like Youtube that are known for their horrid comments might benefit from a similar mechanism?

5. Change the structure of Digg

Although this portion is largely moot since Reddit =/= Digg, I did noted at the time that there was only one woman listed as working for Digg. I do note that if the avatars of the Reddit Team are anything to go on, the gender balance in the Reddit team is much closer to 50/50 than the former Digg team and that alone may account for some of the differences.

So what else is different?

The topic is admittedly less controversial

OK, so I will admit it. My instinct tells me there is a lot different between these two posts. In the Digg post, I was outwardly challenging the Digg community, and calling them out — and no one has an easy time not going to a defensive place when being called out, however gently and constructively I tried to frame things in my essay!

In the OP on Reddit, there was nothing necessarily to flag it as a piece of Feminist writing, and that may have meant it flew under the radar of any anti-feminist activist out there. As I said above, it’s entirely possible that if this post had ened up on the front page of Digg with the same title even 6 years ago, it might have received the same reaction. But… maybe not?

Also: my overall post on the second essay was actually all about changing feminism to be more inclusive towards men, and recognizing that there hasn’t been the same opening up of men’s roles as there has been of women’s roles, which may be leading to some social discomfort and discord that’s actually exacerbating issues that modern women face when trying to ‘do it all.’ Although I reference that I feel this way in my digg essay, it’s buried in the middle of a rather long paragraph so I don’t expect that it changed the perception of many peoples stereotypes of feminism anyhow.

There are more women as faces of the tech industry than there were in 2007

Mainstream news seems to have embraced, at least in part, female technology journalists (see: this huffington post article about 28 women in tech to follow on twitter). I am also frequently inspired by watching the women who are so prominently feature on the Twit Network, which I consume regularly. Although Leo openly admits that he wishes he had more women, and that sometimes things can get a bit bawdy, I love having the voices of women so often included in his podcasts. For example, Gina Trapani is one of the regulars on This Week in Google, offering her fantastic perspective as a coder and technology enthusiast. I am inspired by this openly queer woman who is not afraid to be smart and opinionated, but also feminine! It’s examples like this that I think help to shift stereotypes about the tech sector being male dominated by some kind of biological difference, for both men & women. I know it has helped me to feel more confident in speaking up as a geek, and I feel like I am less being seen as the ‘anomalous female who actually knows what she’s talking about when it comes to technology’ and more respected as a peer.

Geek is Chic

Geek culture is much, much more mainstream now, which may mean that the audience that uses Reddit is also much broader. (I can attest that the front page of Reddit is bigger than the front page of Digg! I received 4x as much traffic on my site with the more recent post, despite not making it as “high up” and with the ability for some users to filter out TIL in their front page.)

Now, I love geek boys (hell, I married one!) and I recognize the fact that man geek men have experience significant hate from women in the past because of their geek status that is particularly emasculating (even if I don’t respect the fact it often leads to lashing out at all women…). So this shift in demographic may be a piece of the picture.

It’s just better on the internet in general now

I believe this is true. I can’t remember the last time I found myself in a place where I didn’t feel like my voice was valued specifically because I was a woman. I also see lots of awesome mainstream geek men making comments about gender… which may (See: my favourite xkcd comic evar).

Feminism isn’t a dirty word anymore (questionmark…?)

Well, I hope so! That being said…

Thanks for reading, discussing, sharing, & mostly for being respectful

I’m being brave this time, guys.I’m trusting the Reddit community.

I’m leaving discussion open on this post.

I’m only midly freaking out that someone might connect this Reddit account to my real life and decide to make my life a living hell (although strangely, I feel safer and more in control of this than I would have 2007… thanks to TECHNOLOGY! #unlisted #digitalvoicemailforwardingservice #privacycontrolgranularity #whoisprivacy).

I’m looking forward to the comments on Reddit!