The focus of my ‘Online Deliberation’ project/paper will be on http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews. This site is of particular interest to me because it is one of the main places I get my news and the deliberation that goes on in the comments often plays an important part in shaping my opinion on different stories. It will be interesting to critically analyze the quality of deliberation on the site and see what I am truly exposing myself to.
/r/news is an appropriate site because reddit is focused on creating discussions and deliberation. Its comment sections typically have lively debates, fact checking, and suggestions on how to solve various problems. There is no better comment section than on reddit, which makes it a great site to use for this project.
I have a very good impression of the quality of deliberation that goes on in the reddit.com/r/news comment section. Every comment section is filled with people making thoughtful comments on the stories which lead to very productive discussions. People on reddit value backing up their points with sources and keeping debate civil. This culture leads to a fantastic quality of deliberation. However, there seem to be less viewpoints represented than would be on a mainstream news outlet, so the deliberation taking place on reddit often may not include every point of view.
I have never been on Reddit, but it seems like an interesting source. There seems to be a plethora of articles with plenty of feedback so you should be able to expose yourself to some lively deliberation on hot issues.
I picked reddit for this too–I don’t comment on the site very often, but the couple times I have (talking about either voting rights in PA or the piano) prompted a good debate/discussion.
I think reddit will be a great website for this assignment. Over christmas break my brother told me about reddit and I began viewing it and it is very interesting. They tend to have a huge variety of articles that bring up very interesting viewpoints. It will be interesting to see how much deliberation takes place.