In Defense of Reddit

After reading through volumes upon volumes of rancid criticism of Reddit in the wake of the Boston Marathon tragedy, I'd like to give the US and international media, a very big finger.

• Should criminal investigations be crowdsourced - CNN.com
• Reddit Moderator apologizes to Sunil Tripathi's family - Huffington Post

True - Reddit was a major source of inaccurate information at the time in r/findbostonbombers but NOT the origin. somebody uploaded the pictures and the community just discussed its veracity.

BUT, BUT, BUT

It was mainstream media which picked up the story and decided to publish the items in the subreddit as fact. The only purpose of the subreddit was to have a venue where people could put pictures to aid investigators, discuss their veracity and NOT to publicize them as matters of fact. It was a discussion forum for Pete's sake. Again, it was the media that published these stories as fact.

It's very much akin to when the media takes any of the random stories in r/conspiracy and publish them as news.

As an avid observer of the events as they transpired, I began to notice that several of the participants in the subreddit - are actually media correspondents who published unverified stories within minutes after a topic comes up on that subforum. 

This was published within a few hours
after the topic came up on reddit

If any, I would say, that the criticism specially by CNN - has to do with covering their own behinds.

It was CNN that published the description of the suspects while it was still being discussed on the subreddit whether the identification had any merits -  before even the NYPOST article came out. 

For what it's worth, the media should have checked their sources before publishing any piece of information.

Look at this woman, she identified Sunil as the son of these two when in fact he was their youngest brother!... Facepalm...

Can't embed the video.. click to watch it on Huffpo

For what it's worth, the damage has been done, apologies were given, lessons were learned and the collective will not make that mistake again. I for one, think that there's a concentrated effort by some mainstream media outlets to discredit reddit due to its skyrocketing success that is making mainstream media - obsolete.

Nevertheless, now is not a time for condemnation but of things such as these:

We Owe Sunil Tripathi's Family an Outpouring of Love and An Apology. We Brought Unintentional Pain To Them Tonight. Let's Find Their Son.