Scholarly Conversations

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Would you consider reddit to be a reliable source of scholarly information to base your personal learning? I think most people would claim that there is no way they would take the information found on reddit to be valid or reliable (much like many distrust the information found on wikipedia). Those people, like myself, would be very surprised to hear that reddit can be a valuable resource for learning about and reading scholarly, peer-reviewed, materials. I am specifically referring to certain pages within reddit because I am sure many parts of the website are full of misinformation and other items that are less than scholarly. The area of reddit that I am going to be discussing is r/science.

There are many reasons why this page is successfully able to ensure the validity and quality of what is posted. The information that is allowed to be posted on the site must follow a strict list of rules and regulations that are put in place to filter out any inaccurate information. The requirements are as follows:

1. Directly link to published peer-reviewed research articles or a brief media summary
2. No summaries of summaries, reviews or popular reposts (over 100 upvotes)
3. Research must be less than 6 months old
4. No sensationalized titles, all titles must include the model where applicable
5. No blogspam, images, videos, infographics
6. All submissions must be flaired and contain a link to the published article, either in the submission link or as a standalone comment.

These rules seem like a great way for the page administrators to filter out bad information, and more importantly, allow users of the page to read the information with the assurance that what they are reading is correct. There is clear authority for the original posts to be posted. The post has to be directly linked to the peer-reviewed work, or to a summary of the work that is of high quality. The authority in-all falls to the administrators of the page. Similarly to other sites, there are people who decide what is allowed to stay on the page. This could pose an issue, because they are able to filter out whatever posts they want, so there is some trust being placed on the administrators. However, this issue can be resolved by allowing a diverse group of people to be administrators so that one group is not solely representing the information. Contributions are easily valued and ranked. Users of the site are able to comment on and vote for posts that they enjoy, and other users can filter for high-rated posts or posts with many comments in order to see what the community values.

Some issues with the system is that you are trusting almost anonymous users to not only filter misinformation, but allow true information onto the site that they may not agree with. Furthermore, users of the site have the ability to vote for or vote against posts, which can affect how many people see the posts. If there is a strong following in the community that does not like something, they will be able to down-vote those posts to bury them away from other users.

While the system is far from perfect, it does allow for interesting community dialogue, and if use responsibly as a community it has the potential for real and valuable exchanges of ideas with people that are potentially vastly different from yourself. The ability to share and discuss information with people around the world and from extremely differing backgrounds is something that wouldn’t have been possible just 20 years ago, and if used responsibly and maturely it can be an incredible tool.