Morgan Fremen

Ramp Art

Creating this gave me a woody!

Repost!

Occasionally I post links to various content on Reddit. Often, a diligent member of the internet's police force informs me that somehow a given image or link has *gasp* already been posted somewhere else on the internet.

"Repost!"

O NOES! Holy Jar Jar Binks' prolapsed rectum, internet police! 

What many who post this don't seem to realize is that a) their message is pointless, and b) Reddit's popularity is all about the pageviews. 

Reddit lives for pageviews. Billions of them, and of those millions are by unique visitors. Some of those visitors are smart, some aren't, and a few are dumb as a sack of hammers. That said, if Reddit were something like a think tank (which it isn't) or a Wikipedia-like foundation (nope) instead of a for-profit company, a self-proclaimed “part-sibling-once-removed” of Condé Nast, Inc., it might do things smarter than it does now.

Putting aside respect for the massive popularity of Reddit and the hard work its staff and board and communities provide, Reddit the site isn't that bright when it comes to sniffing out content that's already been posted. 

There is the somewhat anemic search functionality, which conscientious users occasionally invoke to perform keyword searches in search of existing content, and there are third-party sites like KarmaDecay which provide reverse image search capability for specific subreddits or site-wide. However, note that there is no smart search capability exposed to the users which is savvy to detect whether a given link ultimate leads to something that's been posted before.

Granted, they are in the red. Running a site as popular as Reddit is a huge undertaking, and the infrastructure required to support it increases with its popularity. Even if such smart search were a high priority, investing in its development would bleed resources from their daily operations. 

If anything, users of Reddit who cry "repost" should realize that they're doing more to hurt the site than they are to help it. Comments on Reddit can be upvoted and downvoted, which requires processing power and bandwidth. The loading and rendering those comments also takes power. Worse than the fact that telling someone they've reposted something adds nothing of substance to a discussion about the content in question, it's wasting Reddit's resources.

If content is worthy of being reposted, it often generates some constructive discussion, particularly to those for whom it's a novel find that have never, ever, seen it before. Engaging good content rather than whining about that already seen seems far more worthy of Reddit's dedication to community than its users chiding submitters of content one word at a time.

tl;dr: Repost police, get over yourselves and do something useful for a change.

Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card sure is a classy guy.

Long known for his staunch advocacy against homosexuality and outright disrespect of homosexual people, and just in time for the upcoming film adaptation of his popular novel, Ender's Game, he makes a curiously timely plea to the movie-going public to put aside his views, stating in a statement to magazine Entertainment Weekly, "The gay marriage issue is moot."

How quaint, and convenient! Personally I dislike lining the coffers of such people with my dollars, however groundbreaking their works are. 

Someday, all knowledge and the fruits of people's creativity may be free. No longer will talented writers, actors, musicians, or others have to take on multiple minimum-wage jobs to make ends meet while they struggle on the side to achieve their dreams and pursue their passions. 

Instead, everyone will have their basic needs provided for so that, as Maslow indicates in his hierarchy of needs, people will be able to self-actualize and actually live rather than spend much of their daily life worrying about paying the bills, or their very survival. Not now, not in decades, perhaps not in millenia, but someday... hopefully!

I think a good first step toward such an audacious way of life is to share information.

Here, for example is a freely available set of ebooks in PDF format of the Ender's saga, which can be read online or downloaded. I encourage anyone interested in this fine piece of literature to obtain it at their leisure, without having to pay for it, and with the satisfaction that no royalties whatsoever will make it into Orson Scott Card's quite intolerant little hands.