A few things — first, Subreddits are controlled by moderators — usually the people that created the subreddit or have achieved the most support from the community. They dictate the rules of what can and cannot take place in a subreddit. People that disagree usually end up creating their own subreddits to play in. In that way, it’s MUCH more difficult to corrupt the whole system because the community is really lots and lots of smaller communities.
Now, is it possible to corrupt or influence a popular subreddit — yes, absolutely, but it becomes hard to scale. You do have people that game Reddit — but to do it in a way that is not detectable by the community, you have to almost make it a full time job. A writer for the Atlantic did just that and when it was revealed that his account was a shell account that was mostly created to promote Atlantic and Atlantic-owned content, not only was he banned — the Atlantic and its sites were banned from reddit too. I believe they’ve since let the Atlantic back on the site, but to me, that was a move I could never imagine Digg making — banning an entire domain from being posted on Reddit because of the misdeeds of its staff.
The corruption we have seen to date has mostly been in the area of promotion — the AMA is a great example. As I stated in my post, it’s now customary for major movie studios to consider doing an AMA as part of the digital campaign for a film — provided its target audience matches well with Reddits. the iAm AMA thing went from being mostly unique but not well-known people with really interesting stories to lots and lots of B-list celebrities and the Internet famous. That’s a shift — but it seems to be a shift that most users are OK with.
I imagine we’ll see a special Celebrity iAm AMA pop up at some point — and maybe one fo politics too.
But as far as gaming the site for pageviews, that’s the thing too — unlike Digg, Reddit can leave to substantial traffic for news sources, but it’s not as much as a guarantee. In short, you have to be smart about it to corrupt the system (the way the Atlantic did — and they would have been safe if the guy had used a wholly original username and not one tied to his Match.com account…whoops) and that takes far more time than most people are willing to invest.
If that makes any sense. I think the differnece is that the community has a lot more to say about the direction of the site than an algorithm, which was not the case for Digg.
