So you’re poking around the web, and you find a skeptical article that simply rocks the casbah (yes, I’m old). You’re dying to tell everyone you can about it, but how to get the word out?
There are lots of options, actually. Skeptic KyleV just sent me a note saying that reddit.com has its own skepticism section! That’s fantastic. Reddit is a social network site where people submit articles they like, and others can vote them up or down, and leave comments. As an article gets more votes, it rises in the list, and more people see it. In that sense it’s much like Digg, too. A lot of people seem to prefer Reddit over Digg, and in fact while I am a big fan of Digg, they have taken a couple of weird turns lately… I’m specifically calling them out over their toolbar, for example.
Anyway, submitting articles to these social networks is a great way to get the word out. When I have an article "front page" on Digg, for example — meaning it rises up to a certain level and moves from the upcoming section to the actual main science or space section — I might get tens or even hundreds of thousands of page views to that page. It’s incredible.
We skeptics have a hard time getting our word out. We don’t have a lot of celebrities pretending to be skeptics (like Jenny McCarthy pretends to be a medical researcher) so it’s tough for us, plus lot of the times people don’t want to hear the truth. But it helps a lot if those of us in the trenches at least get to hear about news when it comes out, the Reddit skeptic section is a great way to raise the alarm when needed.
April 20th, 2009 at 8:52 am
As far as I understand Ms McCarthy does pretend to be sceptical… about honesty of pharmaceutical companies.
April 20th, 2009 at 9:09 am
I spend way too much time on Reddit. They tend twards a paranoid police states gonna get you perspective but they still have lots of interesting stuff there.
April 20th, 2009 at 9:14 am
you know, she might have a point there … health care in the US is so profit oriented (as opposed to health oriented), there is no money in healthy people, there’s also no money in dead people, the real money is in healthy people with one (or a few) chronic diseases hence there might be a certain interest in pharma industry to keep things unchanged. Nevertheless, that definitely doesn’t apply to vaccination (there’s no money in dead kids!)
April 20th, 2009 at 9:17 am
yes, I’m old
Not in astronomical terms!
April 20th, 2009 at 10:28 am
OT – Stephen Hawking has been admitted to hospital:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article6133752.ece
April 20th, 2009 at 10:29 am
what about AIDS ’skeptics’, anthropogenic global warming ’skeptics’, holocaust ’skeptics’, smoking-cancer link ’skeptics’. I think there are plenty celebrities pretending to be skeptics.
April 20th, 2009 at 10:30 am
blockquote fail. Lack of preview really sucks.
April 20th, 2009 at 11:32 am
Yay! Come help contribute articles to the Skeptic Reddit and join in on the discussion. Also, go be skeptics around reddit and battle the credulous on their own ground (/r/Health/ is particularly full of crazy).
April 20th, 2009 at 11:38 am
We did have Johnny Carson till he vanished… We need a new celeb in our ranks… Perhaps we can recruit one to come to TAM? Got any free tickets you could hand to somebody famous? But whom…
April 20th, 2009 at 11:49 am
I have an account on Reddit, but these bloody gubment computers block something there so I can’t vote on stories.
April 20th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
I go with Reddit over Digg for a million reasons, but one of the main issues is that the comment system there is light years better, and the comments themselves are similarly that much more quality then their Digg counterparts.
April 20th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I love the DiggBar, I am actually digging sites 10 times more often because of it. I used to forge to go back to digg to make a digg. Now I do not have to!
April 20th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
[Rant]
— at the right of the article title — APOD is a case in point.
What annoys me about Digg are those selfish bastards who cannot be bothered to provide a brief description of the article that they are submitting (only a few lousy asterisks, e.g., ****), just so that they can be a “firstie” and get their smug-mug git icon of themselves — the kind that is asking for a punch on the nose!
[/Rant]
April 20th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
The Diggbar can be turned off. And those of you who use Reddit, the Redditbar (or whatever it’s called) can be turned on.
I used to love Digg, but after a while I realized that the only way that anyone will see one of your submissions is if you’re one of their powerusers. Which is why I switched to Reddit.
Also, Digg blocks all submissions from the JREF web site. Makes me wonder what else they’re blocking.
April 20th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
@T_U_T: Yeah, that’s happened to me with html edit tags. I guess html markup is scrubbed even if you’re allowed to post URIs (once approved by the blog master). So: don’t do anything fancy, stick to plain text until we’re informed just what we can do. Of course if you’re the enterprising type you might poke around – but then you look like a spammer.
April 20th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
We don’t have a whole lot of celebs acting as spokespeople, true, but we also do not tend to have churches on every street corner to collect money for our causes.
April 21st, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Reddit’s Atheism subreddit is also fairly skeptic-oriented (obviously). http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism
The things posted to it tend to be slightly more anti-religion, but they have some good skepticism.
April 21st, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Slightly OT, but the twin sites (run by same people with slightly different purposes) http://www.overcomingbias.com and http://www.lesswrong.com are there to discuss rationality, basically how to stop thinking magically. Has a lot on biases, decision theory, and the like. I think a number of people here may find it interesting.
April 21st, 2009 at 11:49 pm
I added a comment yesterday pointing to an article about a scam called Blizz Bio Sculpting. It has not appeared here. I have sent it to JREF as well. Nowhere more than here in India is skepticism required as many of the scams perpetrated are directly life threatening.
I hope you and/or JREF will highlight this scam. Thanks.
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:41 am
I don’t think any of us will truly be old until we can’t follow the beat to “Rock the Casbah” anymore. May that never happen.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:57 am
I’m at BadScience.net on and off, a column from the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Is that the kind of scepticism you mean? But what you want is a facility where you can have displayed on the original Web site “A whole bunch of people think this web page is bogus”, which for one thing you might not want to have on your pages. Anyway, does someone do that? There are services that supply members’ comments on Web pages to other members, but I think they haven’t exactly grasped how large the World Wide Web -is-. So really you want a service where the web site opts in for all visitors to see how markup users commented on the page, but then you might not like what they said.
Actually, what happens if the page content changes? BBC for instance is generating some broadcast show pages dynamically. Same link gets you this week’s new edition.