Reddit bomber crew series#

Ideas are distilled, focussed, and amplified. Through Reddit’s comment system, in which comments can be upvoted or downvoted-some comments rise while others get buried-and karma system, which “reflects how much good the user has done for the Reddit community,” an amorphous kind of thought leadership emerges.

Reddit bomber crew series#

(Reddit is owned by Advance Publications, the corporate parent of Condé Nast, publisher of The New Yorker.) It is organized into a community, or a series of communities, that lend themselves to intense focus on a single task or topic, with the labor divided among a multitude of workers. The hive mind is perhaps most perfectly embodied by Reddit, which, besides claiming to be “the front page of the Internet,” is structured in a way to produce something that most approximates a swarm. Currently, one of the top posts in the subreddit /r/findbostonbombers-which has removed any links accusing Tripathi of being the bomber- is a post from a Reddit moderator that “extend deepest apologies to the family of Sunil Tripathi for any part we may have had in relaying what has turned out to be faulty information.” Though much of it has been deleted from Reddit, references to a “smug celebration” remain. Not only did it unleash a torrent of what one Redditor characterized as “highly offensive messages” on a Facebook page called “ Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi,” which was briefly taken down before reappearing with a post about the “tremendous and painful amount of attention… cast on our beloved Sunil Tripathi in the past twelve hours,” it prompted a round of celebration that Reddit had named Tripathi before the B.P.D. Fuelled by erroneous reports that the Boston Police Department scanner dropped his name-a chain of events spectacularly recounted by Alexis Madrigal-it failed rather spectacularly in the case of Sunil Tripathi.