I'm going to be the grumpy old man and say I think this is a step backwards, not forwards. Detailed, minute by minute, updates on 'breaking news' like this are just an extension of the ridiculous 24 hour news cycle that I imagine many redditors dislike.
Personally I think that sampling the news at most daily is quite enough.
24 hour news is banal not because of its immediacy, but because, since it is always on, it needs to fill itself with lower quality items. Frequent and recent updates on a current event on a ad-hoc basis is different in that it doesn't have the imperative to fill up the gaps.
Also, due to the ranking of posts, the compelling stuff rises. Compellingness, while not always correlating with quality, is at least an indicator. If quality posts rise and are then being used to then shape the discourse at an early stage, this flows through and directs the thoughts of those presenting more measured and considered pieces, thus making the whole eco-system better.
Sampling the news daily is quite enough for most people, but surely if you are wrapped up the event and need urgent news this format is a good thing. Also, if it improves the news that you then get at a daily rate, this is also good.
I fail to see the need for up-to-date stats on who has died and where. It fills the exact same need for an dopamine rush that traditional news does. "Compellingness" is just another way of saying it satisfies the mind's desire for more little chemical hits.
Anyone that has a direct need for the information (family, friends) can get it through the usual channels. For everyone else, it's just morbid fascination no matter how you attempt to justify it.
I believe Reddit is the sleeping (not so sleeping actually) giant of social networking. With it's subreddits it's not like digg. I am not saying it's monetizable currently but it probably the biggest website your mother doesn't know about.
The part that is particularly noteworthy is not that "Reddit" discussed the event, rather, Reddit enabled a single user named integ3r to offer a more succinct, comprehensive, unbiased, unsensationalized story than anywhere else in the media surrounding the event.
It's also not a new thing. Typically when something like this is happening in the world, someone finds their way onto reddit and keeps a flow of information going.
I don't think so. This isn't ground breaking for reddit. The "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" standard in the HN guidelines is pretty high and I don't think it's reached by the TC article. It doesn't contain any significant analysis, but a rundown of articles that are with a couple excerpts.
Yes it's newsworthy, Aurora or any other event has a limited shelf life, therefore to derive maximum page views each news outlet must differentiate their story to disseminate some new information for each cycle. News always has to have something new. A story about reddit and aurora thus qualifies as news and drives page views because it's related to a current event.
Keep in mind that for Aurora you kind of get quadruple nerd score because of the subject matter, and it's about reddit so you're going to get all the reddit traffic too.
Thinking is hard, if you tell journalists that arabs revolted because Twitter loves freedom then they will write that rather than doing their own research and finding out that people were so hungry they didn't care about the retaliation from the regime.
Same thing with Aurora tell them its about reddit and they'll write that, if IRC had a PR agency then efnet would be where people got their Aurora fix, but since EFNET doesn't and Conde Nast does...
Journalists were the first to reach out to us, not the other way around. While I do agree that there is a trend in online journalism to hunt down page views rather than legitimate news, I personally feel that the story presented here is newsworthy. The information provided by integ3r on the shooting was the most succinct early coverage that I saw. Of course I'm a bit biased on that point.
Flagged. I think this is just an excuse to get the story about the shooting, which normally wouldn't be appropriate, on to HN. This type of behavior on reddit is also not new. Self posts have been very popular there. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
The times are really changing. When Steve Jobs passed away, I've learned about it on HN and Twitter about half an hour before mainstream news picked up the story.
Personally I think that sampling the news at most daily is quite enough.