Postcards from The Pug Bus

Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Culture

Quoting Reddit Users You Have Not Interviewed Ought to Be a Capital Crime

6 months philmaggitti
An illustration for the Reddit users article. A lone person sitting in a drab basement hunched over, typing furiously on a glowing laptop. Looming directly behind is a translucent, ghostly figure representing a lazy journalist.
The Journalist in His Natural Habitat: Harvesting others’ ideas like a digital tapeworm.

In the annals of modern media, a new breed of wannabe “reporter” has emerged, wielding not a tape recorder or a notebook, but a scroll wheel. Their beat? Unsuspecting Reddit users.

Why bother with pesky, time-consuming interviews, fact-checking, or human interaction when a treasure trove of unfiltered, unverified content awaits on the untamed digital savannah known as Reddit.

This deplorable form of “journalism” – we use the term with the kind of strained politeness one reserves for a distant, too-loud relative – involves a simple  technique: the “Keyboard Safari.”

Our lazy scribe ventures into the wild heart of subreddits, observing  native users in their natural habitats. “FartMaster99” divulging the intimate details of a regrettable rash on a private zone? Golden! “AnxiousAvocado” lamenting a calamitous sourdough starter? Pure editorial fire!

The process is breathtaking in its efficiency. Step one: scrounge around Reddit for a usable comment. Step two: Right-click, copy. Step three: Paste into an article, preferably as a clickbait pull quote (“You won’t BELIEVE what happened when this Reddit user discovered a toe in his cereal!”). Voilà! Instant content, zero effort, maximum parasitic extraction.

The Reddit users, bless their naive hearts, are often bewildered. Imagine pouring your soul into a post about your ex, only to find your digital anguish and quite often your handle gracing The Daily Mail, BuzzFeed, or The Mirror.

Or Tasting Table. It is truly the big foot , large-batch offender of dodge. They take a five-year-old thread from r/Cooking and dress it up like it is a breaking culinary revelation. It is not just them; the entire food blogosphere has become a graveyard of recycled Reddit hacks.

Food blogs are the greatest offenders because they are so desperate for “hacks.” Why test a recipe for twelve hours when you can find a comment from “ButterLover66” who claims that putting a dash of soy sauce in brownies is a game-changer? Food blogs take that one sentence, wrap it in 1,200 words of fluff about their childhood in Vermont, and slap an affiliate link for a whisk on it.

This is not journalism; it is a digital peeping Tom act masquerading as legitimate reporting. It is lazy, it is unethical, and frankly, it is beneath the dignity of anyone who claims to inform the public. But hey, it gets clicks; and in this modern age of content farms, that is all that  matters.

(No Reddit users were not interviewed by us but quoted anyway for this piece.)

For more red-hot dispatches from a culture in decline, click here and run for cover.