Under threat

AUGUST 25TH, 2016 — POST 234

Reddit is an easy way to get eyes on a piece I write. My most viewed and most read piece — on Ex Machina’s Visual Effects Oscar win — received 30k views and 11k reads, mostly because it hit the top page of the r/movies subreddit after I shared it there. I’ve written before how this is largely a vanity metric, however. These views didn’t turn into recommends or follows on this platform, most returning to Reddit to comment and engage. I haven’t been sharing on Reddit much recently, nor really sharing at all — more just going through the motions of writing and letting my pieces sit.

So yesterday I shared my recent piece on Palmer Luckey on Reddit across three subreddits: r/gaming, r/virtualreality, and r/oculus. Sure enough, I saw the same vanity boost in views and reads, and sure enough the number of recommends and my number of follows stayed unchanged. But something else happened. I normally wouldn’t share with this level of granularity and doing so revealed how subreddits operate in a way I only had some small sense of before.

It’s important to note that the community of r/oculus is probably largely a subset of the r/virtualreality community, which is itself probably subsumed within the r/gaming community. With the piece about Oculus’ CEO Palmer Luckey, I should have expected engagement to be highest on the smallest of these communities, namely r/oculus. And it was. In fact, there’s a perfect mapping of engagement across the three as they get more specific — r/gaming didn’t give a shit (no comments, no upvotes), r/virtualreality cared a little (2 comments, 7 upvotes), and r/oculus cared the most (23 comments, and at least 1 downvote).

The fact the piece was downvoted in r/oculus should shed some light on the content of those 23 comments. The first comment made on the piece:

“Reads like a Vive fanboy hit peice on Lucky.” (sic)

Others had better-founded criticism:

“it’s a pretty shit article. It references some dubious claims as fact like the Xbox controller being the reason for the delay and the revive break being an intentional slight against the vive and it’s users. Both things are possible but reporting them as the only truth is lame.”

I jumped in to concede the leaps I’d made, playing too liberal with the facts. I updated the story to reflect the concession. Then my favourite:

“You are the one out of depth. You are a hack capitalizing on the success of an individual SQLuckeySQ that has already far surpassed anything you will ever accomplish for your own notoriety and gain. Have fun sliding back down to the bottom that you crawled up from.”

The reason the Ex Machina piece played so well was that it was about a movie r/movies emphatically adores and I was positive about it because I adore it too. Even though I wasn’t critical of Luckey — the piece really wasn’t about that — the mere suggestion that Oculus has had its struggles was enough for the most fervent loyalists to come to the company’s defence. Here I was, an outsider to the community, coming in to spew criticism at the object of r/oculus’s loyalty: read as an attack of some of the members of r/oculus themselves.

Reddit often serves as the perfect microcosm in which to observe the modern amplification of identity that occurs inside the internet’s many silos. And it’s this same phenomenon that played out far more violently, more aggressively during the “Gamers are dead” flashpoint of 2014’s Gamergate. With so many publications writing versions of the “gamer as an identity has been corrupted”, the Twitter and Reddit gaming communities were whipped up into a fury, one that targeted journalists like Polygon’s Chris Plante for what was seen as a suggestion that they themselves were corrupted.

Whilst Gamergate has largely quieted down, it’s unwise to think the identity-affirming place of the internet has any less potency. And it’s not at all exclusive to Reddit or “gamers”. The “tumblrina” phenomenon — of mostly young, mostly white, obnoxiously and often inconsistently principled girls on Tumblr — operates in the same way. The internet sets up bunkers so quickly and with so little friction that it’s easy to understand why so many feel under threat.