How I learned to stop worrying and love a social media site.

When I first began exploring social media sites like Digg and Del.icio.us a few years ago, I immediately disliked them. Del.icio.us' tagging system seemed more cumbersome than revolutionary. Digg was too chaotic and too dominated by the silly and outrageous. The noise-to-signal ratio was intolerable: partisan disinformation, dishonest links ("Click here to see Britney naked!" takes you to a polemic about the Iraq war), people "commenting" on stories they have no intention of reading, etc. I also chafed at the fact that Diggers had the ability to "bury" stories they didn't like, which weakened the site's democratic credentials. And later, Slate's Chris Wilson argued that since Digg is largely controlled by about 100 people, it's not really democratic at all. Social media seemed like a shabby foreign country I'd rather not visit.

Yet, while Digg is still off-putting, I've come to genuinely admire Reddit, Digg's lesser-trafficked cousin. I confess that my recent affection for Reddit had somewhat mercenary roots; Digg, Reddit, et al. can be effective places for Web publishers to promote their material, and The Big Money is no exception. But having trolled around long enough now, I find Reddit, when used properly, to be a decent news source and a relatively intelligent window onto the hive mind. Psychologists for years have argued that the information content of news is less important than the context in which people receive it; Reddit moves at a pace at which you can watch cognition and content commingle in real time.

A quick tutorial for those who don't frequent these sites: registered "Redditors" submit links to articles, blog posts, videos, etc., and other Redditors vote them up or down so that the page resembles a kind of dynamic popularity chart. The more popular your submissions are, the more "karma" points you gain, giving your future submissions more weight than the average chump.

That much is true for most social media sites. What sets Reddit apart? For starters, it's well-organized. There are dozens of "subreddits," which break submissions down by category (e.g., politics, funny, video, technology), a highly useful filter that actually works. Redditors are pretty vigilant about making sure that links get put into the right places. Sometimes the site seems a little bossy (the video subreddit insists on "NO POLITICS"), but the result is virtuous coherence that is absent from many of Reddit's rivals.

More importantly, Reddit's not stupid (well, it's not exclusively stupid). As I'm writing this, I'm looking at the "what's hot" list of the economics subreddit, and there are links to Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, derivatives expert Janet Tavakoli, as well as some libertarian/Ron Paul stuff that is the lifeblood of the Internet. I may not want to read all of it, but I certainly don't feel insulted or assaulted by looking at the page. Sure, there are still idiocies to be found in the comments section—show me a Web site where that's not true—but Reddit takes pride in being a more cerebral aggregator. Co-founder Alexis Ohanian told me that as far back as Reddit's 2005 launch, the site's community came from readers of Paul Graham, a Web guru who was one of their initial investors. Not that Reddit wants to reject more frivolous contributions, but it's careful to ring-fence them; see, for example, the Cute List.

This degree of organization has helped Reddit retain a sense of community, even as it has grown to 4.9 million unique visitors a month—about twice the size it was last summer but still probably only about one-quarter the size of Digg. What makes Reddit work is that it is large enough to surface the wisdom (or foolishness) of the crowd but still small enough to make that wisdom both accessible and instructive. Too much growth threatens that utility; call it the paradox of popularity, best summed up by Yogi Berra's classic line: "Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded." Ohanian told me they're keenly aware of the paradox: "We don't want to ruin this great community we've got."