Reddit - a portmanteau of read and it

While I am doing my first assignment, I found a well-written article about Reddit. It's easy to understand! You will learn what Reddit is, how Reddit works, and how Reddit makes money!

OK. I will post the first part here...So, what is Reddit?

What is Reddit?

Reddit is a social discussion forum, a news aggregation site, and an online content rating platform which gained popularity in 2008. The company was founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005 who were roommates from the University of Virginia with majors in Computer science and commerce respectively. Reddit became a subsidiary of Advance Publications; a US-based Media Company, in September 2011. A year later, Reddit became an independent organization, with Advance as its largest shareholder.

According to the founders, Reddit is a source of everything that’s new and popular on the web. It’s a community of millions of other category specific communities where people post, discuss and vote on basically everything that’s interesting in the world.

The name Reddit is a portmanteau of read and it which was chosen to signify the phrase ‘I already read it on Reddit’, which is actually the truth as Reddit acts as the gateway of interesting stuff to the internet.

Source:  How Does Reddit Make Money? Reddit Business Model  (VISHNU ROSHAN · POSTED ON OCT 7, 2017, Freedough.com)

Amazon MT (Mechanical Turk) and crowdsourcing

Although I heard about online recruiting a lot, I have not heard about MT before. So, Amazon really does everything! Which company will be out of business after ToysRus? Well, this is not a point here…

As described by Mason and Suri (2012), researchers can use this HR pool for their studies. We are always hungry for subjects! We want a cheap and large sample size. Plus, quality! Hmm…Yes, quality matters...So, who came to MT for money? Do we have the statistics? Will they be really honest and sincere in conducting a survey or participating in the experiments if they get more incentives? There are a lot of reliability and validity issues. If researchers recruit people for interview transcripts, privacy also matters as Vanessa commented in our discussion. Do we have to include this item in the consent form?

I just talked about some limitations on researchers’ side. However, the most controversial issue around MK is whether it is exploiting low-income workers. Researchers are also ones to blame for this matter. Mason and Suri (2011) highlighted the low cost as one of the benefits, but this is one of the reasons why Jeff Bezos is criticized.   

“Workers tend to receive extremely low pay for their cognitive piecework, on the order of pennies per task. They usually earn no benefits and enjoy no job security.” (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has Reinvented Research)