Sam Harris Leverages Reddit for Podcast Content and the Potential of Crowdsourcing

A couple weeks ago, Sam Harris posted the following to a Reddit community dedicated to him and his work:

From Sam: Ask Me Anything

Hi Redditors —

I’m looking for questions for my next AMA podcast. Please fire away, vote on your favorites, and I’ll check back tomorrow.

Best, Sam

This post to /r/SamHarris generated over 1,300 comments and was shared in communities outside of /r/SamHarris (notably /r/Atheism and /r/BadPhilosophy). Sam then took some of the most upvoted questions and answered them on this podcast.

As someone that believes in the power of democratic, online communities, it is great to see leaders like Sam use Reddit to crowdsource fan questions for his podcast. The alternative to using a platform like Reddit would be to accept questions via social media or email and have to self-filter through all of the garbage. Reddit makes these engagements possible by allowing the community to do the work of filtering. It isn’t perfect, but it works and can be improved on over time, either within Reddit or by new platforms specifically designed for this purpose.

Crowdsourcing questions for a podcast is really just the beginning. There is so much potential for crowdsourced communication to be used by leaders in both the public and private sector. I think the main thing holding leaders back from using these technologies is the general connotation of giving a voice to the public. If enough people are involved, someone will say something stupid, another racist, and another will have a conspiracy theory. Leaders and the public have to learn to accept this and use technology that allows bad ideas to be both disputed and denied visibility in certain contexts.

The thing about crowdsourcing or online community is that a majority of the content is going to be pure shit. Psychologically, we have to get past this and recognize that we can create systems where the shit doesn’t waste our time and we are allowed to focus on the reasonable ideas.