Staring Through His Own Tail Lights

Reddit, man, frickin’ Reddit.  I love it with the power of a thousand suns.

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So some poor mom writes a heart wrenching post about some asshole kids (and there are a ton of them) being mean to her little boy.

I just want him to be happy. My heart hurts for him, and my hugs aren’t enough anymore.

Shortly, some other Redditor, a stranger, writes some of the best, most powerful words I’ve ever read.  Holy moly.  That’s the best writing I’ve seen since the Indian attack in Blood Meridian.

And in the face of it all, asks for two wonderful favors.

1) Please, Never Be Cruel.

2) Please, Always Be Kind.

If everyone would try a little harder to do that….

 

 

Houston Rockets GM Does Reddit

It’s no secret that I love Reddit.  IAmA‘s are one of the main reasons why.

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Today, Daryl Morey, General Manager of the Rockets, is doing an IAmA.  Some tidbits.

On rewarding bad teams:

Being an extremely crappy team is definitely a well worn path to success in the NBA. Each year, the NBA hands the most valuable asset in the game (a scale wage top 5 pick) and hands it to the most mismanaged teams.  We could go with this approach (in fact the Rockets invented it long ago) but we think our approach can succeed as well and can succeed faster even though it is more difficult.

On taking risks:

We were rolling the dice on getting Jeremy Lin but taking smart risks is what we have to do up and down the roster on every move. As only 1 team out of 30 gets to win, you cannot play it safe. A fund manager who beats more than half his peers and beats the S+P 500 is considered pretty good. We have won more games than we lost the past few years (beaten our peers) despite losing our franchise player Yao Ming and it has been appropriately considered disappointing despite the fact that most teams win around one-third of their games after losing their franchise player. We need to keep taking on more smart risk.

Just one more reason to dig Reddit.

Why I Love Reddit

I can take or leave Facebook.  I think Twitter is largely a spam-fest.  Google+ is a beautifully designed, empty place.  But let me be clear about one thing: I love me some Reddit.

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For those about to be rocked, Reddit is an online community:

known for its open nature and diverse user community that generate its content.  Its demographics allows for wide-ranging subject areas, or main subreddits, that receive much attention, as well as the ability for smaller subreddits to serve more niche purposes.  The unique possibilities that subreddits provide create new opportunities for raising attention and fostering discussion across many areas.  In gaining popularity in terms of unique users per day, Reddit has been a platform for many to raise publicity for a number of causes.  And with that increased ability to garner attention and a large audience, users can use one of the largest communities on the Internet for new, revolutionary, and influential purposes.

Think of it as a very active message board populated, largely, by tech-savvy and knowledgeable users.

Enough nerd-talk.  Let me show you why I love it.

Today, I came across an article describing a guy’s 10-year old Civilization game:

The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.  There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

I was a huge fan of Civilization for a long time.  So this was something I was very interested in reading about.  And of course it originated on Reddit.  Not only is there a great write-up by the player himself, there are (as of this moment) 3000 comments.

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Even better, there is now a subreddit dedicated to ending the 1700 year war between the Celts, the Vikings and the Americans.

Nowhere on the internets is the potential for interesting reading higher than at Reddit.

If you are just learning about Reddit, go check it out.  You can thank me later.