Reddit, and any sort of wide-open forum in the Golden Age of the Internet, will always have issues with disturbing fringe users. These are not people you want associated with your site if you intend to attract advertisers. But what is the best way to deal with these folks who are horrible, yet not technically breaking the law?

Reddit, by all accounts, has these sorts of users and more. The FBI should sponsor Reddit in exchange for a continuous view of the freaks and cultists on the site. They probably do it a little already, so there's no impetus to remove these users and clean up the place.

The site began in 2005 some months after the phenomenon called Digg hit the scene. Digg let users vote stories up or down through a simple algorithm. It was dynamic rather than what was traditionally static.

Reddit took this idea and combined it with pretty much everything out there, from gamification to modern versions of the CompuServe SIG (Special Interest Group). It promoted more genuine community, volunteerism, and social media trickery than Digg, which is now just an RSS reader.

The combination of ingredients made Reddit a winner. This is largely because it was a self-defining universe unto itself. It was like watching John Conway's Game of Life computer simulation. It was an evolving world, a "living" entity, and that is what made it attractive to a lot of users, some of whom were sketchy.

In fact, you could argue that Reddit was a perfect reflection of real life, the kind of new virtual world that could only be achieved via the world-wide Internet. The system spawned what are called subreddits, which took on a life of their own and expanded or contracted as needed to absorb those interested.

It was an all-new Wild West with no sheriff in town to maintain order or to quiet the bullies. Various volunteers and the built-in social media soldiers and trolls calmed things down. But it was not as effective as a policeman.

All the cool mechanisms of Reddit, such as the voting system and the non-linear organization, were now side shows. They were irrelevant on some horrid subreddits, typically related to porn. Worse, nerdy perverts were skewing the results for their own amusement. Only Tumblr, with its infinite sub-domains, is more out of control when it comes to displaying imagery exhibiting outrageous pornography, all of which would have been illegal and actionable only a few decades ago.

Now one of the Reddit founders, Steve Huffman, has returned to his creation to fix it. By fix it, I mean police it.

The shame is that Reddit could have just let the mania continue. Let the game play out. Let the fringe societies grow and dissolve naturally. See what happens! Reddit had the potential to become one of the great sociological studies ever. It could have figured some way to monetize it anyway.

This is indeed the Golden Age of the Internet, but that is coming to an end. Reddit was probably the last chance we will ever have to see the natural evolution of a lawless (self-policing) out-of-control community. Too bad. You can be sure it would have been fascinating, if not hilarious.

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