StarTalk Radio - Unravelling Reddit with Alexis Ohanian

Episode Date: April 8, 2016

Neil deGrasse Tyson explores the “front page of the internet” with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Learn about how Reddit got started, net neutrality, trolls and more. With BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis and co-host Eugene Mirman. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk and I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And I also serve as the director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. My co-host today, Eugene Merman. Eugene! Hello. Always good to have you, man. Great to be here.

You know, I hear you so much in your voice work. Now when I see you in person, I just imagine the little characters you're playing. So I wonder if it's really you or some animatronic version of you. Yeah, no, it's, uh, I'm the cartoon. So today we're featuring my interview with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit. He's the co-founder of Reddit. And many people consider it the front page of the Internet because it gives you access to all the most influential websites of the day because people are picking what matters because they are become the, I was going to say the thousand eyes, the million eyes for you that you don't have to then do yourself. And I have very little expertise in this, so anytime that happens, we reach out into the academic world and find people who do. And today we've got journalism professor and author Jeff Jarvis.

Jeff, it's not the first time on Star Talk. Oh, no, I'm honored to be back. I guess I didn't screw up too much. Exactly. And you're official professor of entrepreneurial journalism at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism. So very good. And you've got two books.

One of them, I love this title, Geeks Bearing Gifts, Imagining New Futures for News. So that's an explicit recognition that news is no longer in the hands of the media moguls, that we've got up-and-coming whippersnappers who are shaping that world. We hope. We hope somebody shapes it. Somebody rescues it. Hope means you don't really. We don't know yet.

We don't know. You want willpower. Yeah. You want to actively mold. Yes. We want the force to operate it. Yeah. A mystical mitochondria based power.

So tell me about the role of aggregative, is that a word? Yeah. It is now. It is now. Aggregative websites in this regard. I think what God. That's a new paradigm. It is.

That's a different paradigm. We would go to, I would go to the New York Times website, and there are editors and writers, and there is my information. And that is simply not the case today. No, what goes away here is, I think, the idea of the product and the destination. You come to the New York Times, you read the New York Times, you know what they have, and you're done for the day. You're welcome. That doesn't happen anymore because now, obviously, you can get the best from the BBC and The Guardian and The New York Times and The Washington Post and bloggers in an instant.

And so it's important, too, to send those people audiences, to send those outlets audiences. So aggregation, I think, is a very good thing because it— So it actually feeds these sources that wouldn't otherwise get their own— Exactly. But that means I have access to a dozen media sources at once. Is that correct? Absolutely, you do.

And it also means that these sources have to be better at being found out there. So it's not just about being on Google News. It's also about being throughout Facebook. The Washington Post is now putting every single one of its articles onto Facebook Instant Articles. Oh, okay. And I found that I'm reading a lot more Washington Post

now than I ever did because people are linking and recommending things from the Post. And you're going to the post's website. No. No. These are appearing on Facebook now. Weren't you paying attention to what he just said? Well, yeah, but he also had said that you link the aggregate links to the site and it

sends you the links there. That's often been the case. But now what's happening, there's two things that are happening. Aha! You've been listening, Neil? Oh, I see there's two things. Go on. I've been misinterpreted by both of you now.

They're obviously not clear. That's the answer. Instant articles means that you publish on Facebook with your own ad. So you're making money now, which is a good thing. Then Google has come up with this answer, which is called AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, which are just really fast pages, but it makes it seem as if you never went anywhere. It's so fast. So this changes the paradigm of how we use media and news in that news now comes to us. We don't go to it.

And another thing I noticed, which I never knew you could do until I saw it happen on Reddit, that readers can upvote and downvote certain mentions, certain links and the like, so that you get this filtration force operating among people who, if they're of like mind, they've already helped you out, and you don't have to sift through all the chaff that's out there. Yes, and Reddit has a lot of odd things in it, but it also has real news in it, and there is, in fact, some wisdom from the crowd that is visible there, depending upon your topic. And it's divided up into all these sub

reddits and sub sub reddits, and you can slice and dice everything you want to know, and a lot of things you don't want to know are there. Stuff you never knew could be diced in that way. Yes, yes. And so, what are my numbers here? It's got 700 million monthly visits.

It's the 13th most visited website in the United States, 27th in the world as of this month. And that's extraordinary. So, so if we get to my interview with Alexis Ohanian, I, I let off saying that so many, he's young and he's eager and, and, and energetic. And so many of that community of people either never went to college or never graduated from college, if they did go to college. And I asked if he was one of these

to fulfill that stereotype. And so that's what got me started in this next clip with one of the co-founders of Reddit. Check it out. I have to admit, there would be no Reddit for sure if I hadn't gone to college. And I think if we had dropped out, it wouldn't have worked out as well as it did because the idea we technically started in college failed miserably. There was

another company. No one asked me about it because no one knows because it failed so miserably. It was called My Mobile Menu or MMMM and it was going to let people bypass lines by ordering food from their cell phone. My mobile menu. Yeah. In 03, 04, this was, I'd like to believe, ahead of its time. I think like a lot of founders do that. We sort of saw the future, but our timing was way off. And we were lucky because we heard this guy, Paul Graham, give a talk during our senior year spring break.

We went to go hear him talk up in Boston. And his back, he's what? Oh, Paul Graham. So this guy, he had started a startup in the first boom, sold it to Yahoo, did well. Oh, this is the lecture, how to start a startup. Yeah. Oh. He gave this amazing lecture. We met up with him afterward. I talked him into having a coffee with

us. We pitched him on our idea of my mobile menu and he actually liked it, liked it a lot. And a month later he asked us or suggested that we apply to Y Combinator, which was this early seed stage venture firm. They would give $12,000 to me and Steve to just work for a summer writing code and getting users along with 12 or so other startups and hopefully launch us out to the world. But Reddit is not derived from, so what happened there? Well, we applied with that brilliant idea and we were invited up for interviews south to the world. But yeah, Reddit is not derived from mmm. So what happened there? Well, we applied with that brilliant idea and we were invited up for interviews. And Steve and I gave the best interview of our life and we just rocked it and presented to these four partners of Y Combinator. And they called us up that night. We were out celebrating Harvard

Square and they called us to say that we were rejected. And it was fortunate that we were drinking already because then we could just start like misery drinking. And that sucked. And the next morning, hungover on a long train ride back to Virginia, we got a call from them saying, listen, we still don't like your idea. And I was like, Paul, you're really trolling me now. This is rude.

But then he said, we like you too. We still don't like you. Just in case you had any doubt just to be clear on your way back way too early way too early for this and they were right right there was no app store there's no easy way to get the software on people's phones sms was an ugly hack restaurants didn't really have online ordering anything like that so they had fax machines yes exactly that's how they took online orders was through a damn fax. But so now how do you get from mmm to what Reddit is? These are two different species.

This is where good advice goes a long way. It basically said stop thinking about mobile and build something you'll use every day. What do you do every morning? And Steve was an avid Slashdot reader, old school news for nerds, great commenting section, great discussions. And I would use these new newfangled things, tabs every morning. This was new in Firefox back then. And I'd open like 30 and just look across all these different news sites. And neither one of us felt totally satisfied by it. And we were basically tasked with solving that problem. So the problem is I wake up,

it's like, what's the morning report for the world? Yes, precisely. And how for the 20th century, the news of the day was arguably dictated by whatever was on the front page of like, probably the New York Times. And that works for that time, but doesn't work for an internet age where the most relevant news story of the day could be a video on YouTube that someone shot, or it could be just a photograph or could come from any number of sources. And what is the sort of source agnostic front page of the internet and how do we build that and make it democratic? Source agnostic. Is that good? Yeah, that's awesome. Nice. Okay. That was the goal. And we were tasked to basically solve that problem. You tasked yourself? Oh, by the partners. By the partners. They said, go ahead, solve that problem We'll give you 12 grand, go for it

Yeah, so everything's got an origin story So I didn't know that it was An mmm that they started But interestingly, Larry Page and Sergey Brin Before they founded Google The company they really wanted to find Was a pizza delivery company Wow

Thank goodness these guys failed No, maybe it would have been a really awesome pizza delivery. It would have been very good. Open up a wormhole. Self-driving car with an oven inside. A self-driving car with an oven inside that bakes the pizza en route.

And it knows what kind you like. It dings when they ring your doorbell, and then it's ready. See, maybe I'd trade that for all of Google, I think. Tells you when you're hungry and you don't know it. And it can tell you all the members of you, too.

So let me bring back this up-vote, down-vote concept. Can we really trust our fellow people to judge what we should and should not be reading? Does that sink to the lowest denominator? Let me ask you another question, Neil. Can we really trust the citizens to elect a president? We're going to find out. Sounds like you want to dictatorship run Reddit. So, well, I guess, yeah.

So there's a chance you'll miss something. There's a bigger chance I'll miss something if it's put out, if a newspaper is put out by one editor. Now I get different perspectives, different views. I also get the service of somebody reading. We read 20 versions of the story. We found the best one. You can also go to the second page of Reddit, Neil. You don't have to just read only the top three things.

You can scroll through and vote stuff up. What's your explanation for how it came to be that Reddit users, they're known all over for being smart, savvy. Trolls. Destroying people's lives. A few of them. There's bad apples in every orchard. I don't think they lead the world in trolling. And I would learn later than probably I should have how well-known my work was on Reddit.

And so for that to be a sort of community-wide thing, and they all knew it and they'd chat about me, it says that they have some awareness and sensitivity. How does that happen? There's a level. Well, number one, I think there's an inherent generosity in people. I also think there's an inherent ego in people they want to show off that I know more than you do which is the appeal of Wikipedia

but I think in the end And the appeal of even whether or not you believe you could be a contestant you want to see people be smarter than other people on Jeopardy, for example That show's been around for like 40 years You want to think you're smarter than all those idiots No, but even if you're not, you want to see someone who's smart beat somebody else who thinks they're smart.

Yes, that's true. That's true. You do like, yes, Jeopardy is fun to watch the two people fail. Not one person win. Versus Wheel of Fortune where you think they're all idiots. Yeah. So in that little, the previous interview clip, I didn't get the answer to how it got to be named Reddit. All I heard was the mmm. Which is owned by the crash test dummy.

I remember the crash test dummy. Yes. So I always try to walk like they did. They had this great, this great walk as they went to their death in the car. So let's go back to my interview, just find out where Reddit comes from. Check it out. Reddit. The name comes from where? Latin because I'm an erudite Scott. No, here's what's great.

Here's what's great. Okay. So it came from the fact that we couldn't come up with a good name. We wanted to call it, we wanted to call it snoo because here's the thing. I'd be like, Hey Neil, check out my website snoo. And then you'd be like,

what's new? And I'd be like, exactly. Right? So, let the record show, Neil is laughing at me. I think he liked it. No, I'm laughing with you. Okay. Not at you.

And so, the little icon, his name is Snoo. Has he? Yes. The little alien. Alien. Creepy alien creature. He's not creepy. Or it's not creepy. It's actually not gendered. It's what is it kind of thing. creature. He's not creepy. Or it's not creepy.

It's actually not gendered. It's what is it kind of thing. You look at it. I don't know what that is, but it's a thing. It has a name. Yeah. His name is Snoo. And that's because the person who owned Snoo.com wanted four grand for it.

And we didn't have that kind of money. So we're like, well, screw it. And we ended up naming the mascot that. And then Reddit came about because I was sitting in the library. I remember Alderman Library at UVA and trying to come up with domain names. And I liked this idea. I hoped people would say I read it on Reddit, which I don't know if they ever have. But that was the bastardization was R-E-D-D-I-T.

Now, I learned a year later, we hired a very smart dude, Dr. Chris Slow, who knew Latin and was like, I think it's to render or there's some clever thing. I don't know. Some Latin person is going to be like, you're wrong, idiot. But it has another version of it that kind of applies to Reddit today, but it was not. And you'll take credit for having that extra depth. Anyone who knows me knows that that is not true. But I will take credit for it. Sure.

I love these back of house stories because you take so much for granted afterwards and somebody had to come up with it first. And there's another part side of Reddit, not just as an aggregator of news and it can send you there, but also it's people sharing their own ideas and their own reactions. And the history of new media reporting was never that except for the opinion pages, right? And now everything is an opinion page. We fundamentally insult the public.

We say, we don't want to hear from you until after we're done with our work. And here's the news. You're welcome. And then we'll allow you to comment on it. But we're going to think you're all trolls and idiots. So we're not going to pay attention to that. That's often the case. And maybe less so actually on Reddit.

Dark view of humanity, don't you think? No, just a dark view of a comment section. But I'd like, I'd like, I never thought of the op-ed section and the letters to the editor that way before. It is that. It's, we will report the news and we'll give you this little column to blather on about, but no one will really care. How much better to collaborate? There's a new company called Harken that enables the public to vote up stories they want the reporter to report on.

And then you assign the journalists. That's collaboration, right? That's pretty cool. Reddit- We're like the field editors telling them what to report on. Well, Reddit is editors. It's people who read so you don't have to. They find the best stuff.

They make judgments. And as long as you stay away from certain topics, it's very good. Well, I had to ask Alexis about people becoming part of the news community by interpreting and sharing their own perspective. Let's see what he tells us. I've talked to a lot of Redditors all over the world in the last 10 years, and the stories I hear just consistently blow me away. And one of the key threads of it is one, I'm so grateful because Reddit gave me a voice. And it comes from people. There was a woman with cerebral palsy who told me this. And for her, it mattered because she was being judged solely on the text that she produced,

not how she looked. She couldn't get on stage and tell a million people a story, but she could get on Reddit and tell a million people one. And if it was good enough, if enough people liked it, that's how she looked. She couldn't get on stage and tell a million people a story, but she could get on Reddit and tell a million people one. And if it was good enough, if enough people liked it, that's how she was rewarded for. And then the other part of it is on the consumption. Reddit is a place where legitimate experts will come and talk to anyone, just like having you walking down the street and being able to say, Hey, what's up? Let me ask you a question. I've had people, I guess there's an aviation Reddit community and people just like starting out trying to get their aviation licenses or pilot's license, flying us or whatever, would ask the silly, stupid newbie question and get

responses from veterans with 20 years experience as if it were just a random person walking down the street. And for them, it was so amazing. What makes those experiences so cool is that everyone is treated equally. Wow. I never thought about that, that the internet in that form are people walking down the street. That's great. Well, I always say that we shouldn't judge the internet as if it was the New York Times and every time somebody says a bad word, we think, well, that ruins the internet. Instead, the internet is Times Square and there's fakemos there. And there's also real Elmos. Just to be clear, in case there are mathematicians listening, we're not talking about the variable times squared. We're talking about the location in New York City.

Times Square. There is only one Times Square. Named after, of course, the New York Times. Yes, yes. So it's a mess of humanity there. The Internet is just people. But in a way, it democratizes information, doesn't it? It does indeed.

And I think that if we give faith and trust to the people and we give them the tools and knowledge and respect, good things can often come of that. Wikipedia is a miracle. Reddit is a miracle of what people do in their spare time with generosity. Oh. And information. Yes. Okay, so that's the voice I hear from journalists.

Without us, you'd be nowhere. I mean, no, no, it's a lot of generosity, but it's not like if you go to, like,

I wonder what the Pacific Ocean is. It's just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. It's real. Exactly. It's formative. Right.

And it's as accurate as a real encyclopedia, right? There are those who would argue it makes mistakes, but so do encyclopedias. It's a whole other show.

All right. Yeah. By the way, how accurate are encyclopedias? Quick, quick. So when we come back, anybody who would know,

he would. When we come back from the commercial break, more of my interview with co-founder of Reddit, Alexis O'Haneman with StarTalk. Welcome back to Star Talk. I'm with my co-host, Eugene Merman. Eugene. Hello.

Tweeting at Eugene Merman. Yeah. Yeah, cool. And is not Eugene Merman 87 or something? No, it's not. There aren't 86 others. There's only one of you. Yeah.

And our guest, journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, not your first rodeo. Thanks for... Thank you for having me. Thanks for doing this. We're featuring my interview with Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of the very popular website, Reddit. And one of the most enduring elements of Reddit is the AMA, Ask Me Anything.

And that was my first encounter with Reddit because I was getting these, these people were calling for me to do an AMA with Reddit. I didn't know anything about it. I didn't, but it's where celebrities and other famous people, you, in fact,

you don't have to be famous, but most of them are. You want to be interesting at least. Yes. If you're not famous, you should have done something interesting. You have a job. Everybody's wanted to know about it.

Exactly. I've worked at Starbucks underneath it for 200 years. What did you do? How does that work? Politicians can do it as well. And it's a direct one-on-one conversation with the public. So in this next clip, I asked Alexis how it got started and what makes a good AMA session. Let's check it out.

It was a byproduct. There's a community that was very active still is called ask Reddit where people come and ask questions and you know, others answer. Someone showed up there one day and said, I'm so-and-so ask me anything. And the community responded saying, this doesn't belong here. The format of this community is asking questions, not being interviewed. Go create a new Reddit community for yourself. And the rest is history. And then our slash IMO was born. And now these AMAs happen across the site. Like the music community has regular AMAs. The science community has regular AMAs.

And it's a really cool way, whether you're a celebrity or just a person with a great story to tell. So what makes a good AMA? Authenticity. Authenticity is the biggest. That's the one i think hollywood celebrities and politicians struggle with the most but some do an amazing job sort of breaking that down and just being human i think there's going to be a generation coming up of these whatever digital natives who understand that authenticity is what rules the day there's this weird culture clash now where like somehow i don't know lord can make news for taking a selfie with a zit cream on her face.

Because it's like, oh my goodness, the veil has come off. Here's a superstar with zit cream. That's how the media talks. But for so many people, that's what they seek. We want the authenticity. What makes AMAs successful is that they feel like they bumped into you on the street and just started talking and you talk to them like a human would in real life. So I wonder something, Jeff, if you look at, you can be a celebrity for many reasons and perhaps the most common kind of celebrity is

you're a great actor, actress. And so what does it mean for an actor, actress, to be authentic, if their entire way you know them is being inauthentic, it's taking on characters, and that's their brilliance. Now, what are you going to talk to me about if I'm that actor? What does it mean to be authentic? I will confess that I used to work at People Magazine. There, I said it. And high point of my journalism career. And so what did People Magazine always do?

We always had to have the star in the kitchen. Why? They had to cook pasta. Because we had to believe we're just like them. Oh. They cook pasta too. So they, okay, so. You want to know this person is human.

They go to the bathroom. Not that you would show photos of that. Please don't go there. If you have enough money. When were you with People Magazine? That was what led to the idea for Entertainment Weekly You didn't answer my question In the 80s

You're trying to date me here You're trying to show how old I am No, because I was in People Magazine And I'm not accustomed to people just coming into my house And wanting Did you make pasta? More than my professional identity So at the time I think I'm holding my then, how old was she?

One-year-old daughter, you know, upside down by her ankles over the pillow. Gravity you were doing. Yeah, and she was smiling and showing that I was like, Dad. Yeah. So, okay, so this is consistent with you. So the AMA, I've had the privilege of walking through a crowd with you, and it's got to be torture because everyone is stopping you, asking you cosmic, huge questions. Yeah, and I'm—

And you give them the respect, and you answer their questions. Yes, yes, and I'm glad that my—if we call that fame, that my fame to so many people is not about me. It's about the fact that I managed to trigger some curiosity within them, and now I'm just continuing to feed them. Right, and the AMA, the AMA allows you to scale that. Oh. Right. Walking through one crowd and answering for the 80 hundredth time.

Right. That is a number. It is. Yeah, yeah. No, I know. 800, yeah. Pluto, damn Pluto. Right.

Now you can answer it once and you can refer to it. So the internet creates an an archive of of addresses where you can say don't read me there you ever do that do you ever say read my ama i already answered that uh well what happens is often i i take the challenge of being succinct and i try to answer it succinctly but if you want more then go there otherwise that one encounter is kind of wasted yeah yeah right i try to have every encounter contain something. I like the idea of being like, oh, that's a great question. Go to the internet. The answer's also there. Or for your case, I have a joke about that. Go look it up there.

Go to album four, track three. And that's that joke. Right, right, right. And so I've actually done three or four AMAs. right yeah and so I've actually done three or four AMAs and my least successful AMA and this this authenticity thing my least successful one was when I did one when Cosmos came out promotional yeah I think it's it's had it smelled a little like I'm trying to get people to watch remember any way you answer everything with like that's addressed in Cosmos episode because that'll do it no but my first, no I wasn't promoting anything. It was just, it was time...

College, you were promoting science. You were doing what you do. It was just science and there was not something to check out later. And maybe that was, I was groping for what I would think authenticity would mean, even in my case, and I think that was it. You're always authentic. People had honest questions and I had honest answers. And I try, you know, it's a race between the rate at which you can answer a question and the rate at which they get deposited right

in front of you. And I can't keep them all up, but I go right in a row and I try not to skip them. Remember any question that I do? There are questions I skip. They're the ones where you can't just look up the wiki page. Someone said, how far away is the sun? You're wasting everyone's time right now. You can get that.

I think for me, the most interesting one was they asked, what is the meaning of life? And my reply- Solid question. Then got repeated in many ways and in many times and in many places was, for me, it's simple. It's often when you ask that question, you presume that the meaning of life is under, You presume that the meaning of life is under, you know, a tree stump or a rock or behind a wall as though it is something to be found in life rather than something to be created in life. And so then I describe those things.

That's why he's there. That in my life create meaning. I love that. Lessing suffering. And here's the power of Reddit. That got quoted and linked to all over, right? Yes, it did. It got quoted all over. So you have this archive of something that exists now.

In fact, so therefore I won't tell you what the meaning of life is. You've got to go to the Reddit. But I'm a scientist, and Reddit became this place where people shared scientific thoughts, the scientific community would go. And I wanted to hear what Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, said about the role of science in the discourse in the Reddit community. Check it out. Somehow over the last, I'd say three or four years, the science community has gotten incredibly rigorous and just amazing. The discussions, and I've been... When you say rigorous you mean uh organized in its

presentation of content yes and people get called out for not citing properly people get called out for saying something and it just not being true and you know that's the sort of thing that's not supposed to happen very often on the internet especially when you have a platform with millions of people pseudonymously but it does and i went I went to one of these, the American AAAS, is that right? Okay. Conference. I don't know what that means. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Yes. Thank you. And they're all about bringing science to the people and to like total rubes and idiots like me. But the wild thing was they talk about how the internet has been so helpful

to them. And I get so floored when they talk about how discussions they see on science and ask science, those two communities in general, really help bring even a, just a basic understanding of it to just regular folks. And the thing that really impresses me is when I hear from people who are scientists who come to the science community and get the spotlight shined on them for a minute, for a day, and get to talk to just anyone who wants to ask a question. And it makes them feel really great. And it's like, here I am sitting there thinking like, yeah, the work you're doing is helping move humanity forward. You should feel this great all the time.

But apparently, science is not that cool yet. But it's gotten a lot cooler. And if this can be one way to help popularize it, awesome. So I can speak firsthand that i think science people have greater access to scientific discovery than ever before and you don't you don't have to wait for the one documentary on the one channel out of the 12 channels on television for them to arrive but would but from a journalist professional perspective would you agree with that i, because there used to

be the one science journalist and maybe they got it right. Maybe they didn't, but everything had to funnel through that person. But right now there's more of a democratization of that. Which I think is generally good. When I interviewed you at CUNY, uh, at my, at my university, um, and asked you about this, you need the City University of New York. Sorry, yes. Well, my brain knows CUNY. And asked you about this. You expressed a frustration that the few science journalists who were left too often do it wrong. They say, new study, ever change every idea, that's that. And you eloquently... The way they talk about a new study, they're bathed in hyperbole.

And it's also very easy to get bogus science into real news or sort of bogus studies. Yeah. But even if you have a legitimate study and you don't see it in the context, Neil taught me, of the other studies and where this sits in the process of discovery and verification and debunking. So I think that what's happened in science journalism is there's very few left anymore. That's bad. Very few science journalists. Journalists, yes. Because they get, you know, the industry's in trouble.

However, you have blogs, you have scientists who can go and speak directly to the public. You speak directly to the public. We gave you a journalism award, and you say, I'm not a journalist. But you do journalism by informing the public. And so I think that the popularization of this is good. I also think that academics— By the way, I was very honored to have received that. It's the Knight...

The Knight Journalism Innovation Award. The Knight Journalism Innovation Award. Did I get like an eighth of a Knight Journalism Award? You popularized

through comedy. Which is important too. Thank you. It's important too. Yeah, yeah. You sound convinced. Okay. But there are other places.

So if you look at the internet, you know, people say, oh, wow, you have a lot of followers on your Twitter stream or on your Facebook page, which counts in the single digit millions. But there are other places that attract science interest that dwarf my numbers. Like the Facebook page, I effing love science. Actually, I want to say it so that you can bleep it. Ready? The site, I fucking love science. Did you hear that bleep? Good. Okay. That's another aggregator of news. And there's someone there saying, this is cool. I think this is cool science. I want everyone else to know it. And then they post it. Yes, I love that. I love that site. And they don't have to know every nuance of the facts about it. It's just cool.

And you have people celebrating a culture. The Internet gets smashed too much for spreading misinformation, which it does. But importantly, what the Internet does, too, is just slam down on misinformation. And you can correct mistakes faster. Well, so let me ask you. So, OK, in the next clip, I had to ask Alexis, what does he do about trolls? Because you can, so I guess trolls manifest in many different ways. But if I have, if someone has bad science, you want people to jump in and say, this is wrong, but are they trolls?

The trolls are the bad science? The trolls are the bad science. And then there's the traditional troll who are just kind of annoying. And should we even let them be there in what we like to tout as a free enterprise? So let's see what Alexis says about this. I wish I had a good answer. At some point, there is just a part of human nature that is going to involve this. The best that we can do, though, is continue to build better tools and platforms to basically thwart and curb their effects on the rest of us. On some level, there is this amazing thing, which is when you encounter just that online discussion and maybe it's, I

don't know, it's, I mean, the creationist evolution thing doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon, even in a wealth of knowledge. Oh, let's talk about vaccines because that's a good thing to hate on, right? The amazing thing is I don't know what to do in that situation other than try to win with more counter speech, to try to show even more evidence and even more data that no, it's okay to vaccine your kids. And actually it's kind of morally irresponsible to not, but it's tough because the same internet that enables someone to push out good information about something that is scientifically proven also allows people to push out misinformation and for them to get into great big fights in it where no one seems to win. But the bit of data that I do have is that keep in mind across all these platforms,

the vast majority of people are not actually commenting or voting. So on all these sites, any user generated site, 20% tops of viewers are actually doing something. The vast majority are just reading. And so that's where we have this, the silent majority of people who are just consuming content and where I really hope the best ideas can win So so what's your what's your take on trolls? But if someone simply disagrees with prevailing science and they're rattling on about it. Do they count as trolls? No, that's an ignorant fool That's not someone intentionally trying to get you angry. That's what a troll does. Yeah, there's two different things There's nothing I did not I hadn't thought about that Yeah

There's I believe the earth is flat and I'm saying it to bother you. Some people really believe that. Those people are dummies. Some people do it to annoy you. Those people are terrible. If they said that Hitler made the earth flat, that's a troll. That's a super troll, but that's not... Can I get bleeped, too?

Yeah, yeah, okay. This is on Sirius. You won't get bleeped, by the way. On Sirius XM. Oh, good, yay. On Howard Stern, yay. How about Bowie? So there's a very good book called Assholes of Theory, which tries to create a taxonomy

of people you don't like. And in there, the troll holds a special dark place in hell. The troll, exactly right. A troll tries to get your goat. A troll tries to irritate you and get you going, and that's their success. So this is why we say the rule is, don't feed the trolls. And every time I've made a mistake,

every time I've gone in, I can tell that person is there just to get me, and I argue with them. I regret it. It's wrong. The problem with Reddit is it's an open platform, like Twitter, and people can go in there and do whatever the hell they want. And so it becomes a breeding ground under a dark bridge with mold and mildew of trolls who some of them need their meds but that's what a literal troll is it's under a bridge yeah and and some

of them are sick people um and and and and so there are some of them just teenagers yeah just just have responsibilities mischievous. To just have responsibilities. Mischievous teenagers. And I'm, what is the law, how quickly it has to mention Hitler or Nazis? Godwin's Law. Godwin's Law, which says? The, I'm going to get it wrong, you're a scientist. Really stupid.

The probability approaches unity within 20. The longer the conversation, the argument goes on. That someone will mention either Hitler or Nazis. And I've seen that. Topics had nothing to do with anything. There is an exception now which will get you in trouble. What's that? Donald Trump. Okay.

You are or are not allowed to. You're allowed to make the reference now. Well, when we return to StarTalk, we'll continue with my interview with co-founder of Reddit, Alexis O'Hanlon. Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm with my co-host, Eugene Mernon. Eugene, love having you, man. Hello. And our guest,

professor of journalism, Jeff Jarvis. And you tweet, too? Too much. Too much. At Jeff, depending on what you were drinking at the time, at Jeff Jarvis. I have a Cabernet rule, which is you shouldn't tweet after Cabernet, but I found the loophole. It's called Pinot Noir. Okay. It's okay to tweet after Pinot Noir.

Very good. I'll get you a burgundy one day and we can chill. We're featuring my interview with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the new site and online community. That's a good word to call it community, uh, called Reddit. And you know, it's where we get our news, interact with celebrities. I kind of like it because science is always on those pages and, uh, it's only possible really because the internet is wide open and that brought up this idea of net neutrality. And that brought up this idea of net neutrality. And it's been discussed in Congress and the FCC's weighed in on it.

And I had to, I asked Alexis, what, what's up with net neutrality? Let's find out what he says, and then we'll talk about it. Check it out. Net neutrality is about ensuring that all bits are treated equally. It's this idea that the cable companies don't, and there's only a few of them, they don't get to choose the winners and losers. The market does. And that's really important because the flatness of the internet, the ability to access any content just as equally is really important because could you imagine turning on your internet, whatever your provider might be tomorrow and realizing that like you get Bing search search for free but google costs an extra 20 a month that's where things get real ugly because innovation happens because that kid in her dorm room can compete with google right now okay so no one of your generation proposed this law this is these are old folks these are comcast verizon these are the lobbyists of the large telcos.

Executives. Who are spending lots of money down in D.C. to get their way. But you won. We won. The internet, Americans, a year ago, look at the press from a year ago. Everyone was saying, no chance in hell. Don't bother. It's a done deal.

And a year later, we were able to do it. And you want to know the secret? Phone calls. Phone calls. Online petitions, we were able to do it. And you want to know the secret? Phone calls. Phone calls. Online petitions, those were nice. The Twitter campaigns, the Reddit upvotes, those were helpful. But it was phone calls. And it was getting people.

We did this with SOPA and PIPA. These were these two bills that were going to break the internet a couple years ago. We defeated those two bills in the House and the Senate. Acronyms for? Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. But this was an instance where we actually rallied to create something. We actually rallied to get something done at the FCC. FCC had more petitions signed in, I think, history than anything else.

The Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident was the previous record winner for that in terms of FCC comments. But we triumphed over it and created enough. That was the wardrobe malfunction during the Super Bowl. Yes, indeed. But we now have a new record winner, which was Americans calling to demand net neutrality. And we won. So is this winning? I have in my notes here that the FCC adopted the open internet rules, February 26, 2015.

Is that the winning stroke there? Listen, Alexis Ohanian is a hero of the internet. He led the SOPA-PIPA fight and won and beat down laws that were going to make the internet favor big companies. By fat cat media giants. Yes, but the war is never over. So yes, the FCC has seen the light and they're doing some very good things but two things happening one uh t-mobile for example is now offering you a deal

that says hey if you use these services we won't charge you for the data that sounds like a great deal but they get to choose which services are in that deal and if i have a startup that i want to start my new comedy uh special session you get nowhere unless you're favored by T-Mobile. Also in India, I had a guy in my office just this week named Nikhil Pawa, and Nikhil is the one who fought down internet.org, which was Facebook's, I think, good idea to try to give people free internet access in certain services. But that's not neutral.

If Facebook or the telco, which is far more important, gets to decide which services are free and which you have to pay for, that's an advantage to some players over others, and that's not neutral. So what's the difference between net neutrality and an open internet? An open internet says that no one has to ask permission. No one has to ask permission to be able to get bits to you. That's an open internet. And so if someone is favored over you, if suddenly this podcast is slowed down because you didn't pay the telcos

to deliver it, then you can't go fight and compete with big old television. Everything is delivered as quickly as it can be. Exactly. Even whatever is the hardware constraints. My website is not any slower or faster than CBS.com. A bit is a bit is a bit.

And if you stop it, if you slow it down, if you substitute it, if you censor it, then the Internet is not truly free. And that would have an impact on privacy, presumably. Is that right? Because the information would go through some handler. Yes, but that exists anyway. It's already going through a whole bunch of servers. Okay. And government can come and snoop on that. And so, you're right. The problem is that the NSA

and the GCHQ in the UK basically... Wow, that's a lot of letters. That's like someone's working for the FBI. So, the National Security Agency and whatever GCHQ. Of the GCHQ, and then the United Kingdom. Yes. Okay, go. So they basically put taps on the internet.

And Google wasn't even aware of it, that there was information that was being just sucked up by them. And they put it back together and they saw what was going on. That's a huge problem and a different problem. And that's why we also have encryption. So the other fight going on with the unopened and free internet now is that we should have the right to encrypt our data so you can't snoop on it. But police authorities want to say, no, no, no, we want a backdoor to that so that we can check on the nefarious activities of Dr. In the same way they could have tapped your phone, but with, with court permission. Exactly. Okay. So these are issues that keep on going on and on and on. So basically

prevent terrorist cells and things. So we need a bat signal for Alexis Ohanian. I actually think that Alexis is a born politician. Someday soon, we'll be voting for him for president. My interview with him, he was charming and smart and oh my gosh. Maybe though he should have some mayoral experience.

I don't know if just a businessman becoming a politician is such a great idea. He handles trolls. He can handle anybody. That's true. It's true. If you're president, you can't be doxxed. Everyone knows already where you are.

Is there any, what was the argument against net neutrality? Other than it was, all I heard is it's bad. It's bad. Somebody must have thought it was good. The argument in the industry is we invest a fortune in getting these pipes to you. We should be able to maximally profit from that. And we should be able to offer deals and get paid on both ends. Now we, the users, pay.

They say, well, we also like the show to pay. So what happens if they come to you and say, Dr. Tyson, you have a very nice show here. It would be a shame if something happened to it. It was so slow, you could never hear it. That would be a shame, wouldn't it? It would be a shame. So they might say to you, if you want your show distributed well to everybody, pay us. That way they get paid from both ends.

The user is paying for the internet access and you're paying for the access to get it to the user. That, to use a scientific term, sucks. And also probably there's endless websites that wouldn't even have the opportunity to be optimized or the access to get it to the user. That, to use a scientific term, sucks. And also probably there's endless websites that wouldn't even have the opportunity to be optimized or the money to optimize it. Well, Alexis wrote a book, when was this, back in 2014 called Without Their Permission.

And I didn't know, I hadn't read it, so I asked him about it. Let's check it out. This is a riff off the amazing Grace hopper quote who is one of the ogs of computer science that's original gangster who wrote you know it's or said it's better to ask for wait there's no such thing as original gangster that's gangster that's true you spelled gangster g-a-n-s-t-a that is true all right just all Just, all right. Yep. If you're going to go there, don't like. I shouldn't have asked it.

You're right. I should come correctly. Yeah. You just go all the way. So Grace Hopper, an original gangsta of computer science, she very famously has this quote. I guess now it's cliche, but it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And, you know, we talk about permissionless innovation all the time with technology and the internet and this idea that, you know, someone with a great idea and a laptop and some code can create something that is

essentially or arrange something in a way that's never existed before and just do it. You don't need to open a factory. Like you just open your laptop. I mean, when the internet is at its best as a tool, it really enables people to do the amazing stuff that they want to do whether you want to learn knowledge or put it out into the world i mean i've seen it and i use the book not only to talk about some of the stuff i've been lucky to be a part of but the people i've gotten to meet and know in philanthropy and activism in the arts who have been able to use technology to spread really really amazing ideas and do stuff that they simply wouldn't have even 20 years ago. So do your students read this book?

And do they? They will now. That's good to know. So are you taking your students into the future? Is that what you do? They're taking us into the future. Right. Because that's the issue.

You're probably three times their age or something or some factor. Thanks so much. You're like, what, 19 times older? You're probably three times their age or something or some factor. Thanks so much. You're like, what, 19 times older? You're a wizard, right? Yes. I tell the students every time they start, I say, the future is yours. You have to create it. I'm too old.

I'm not going to see it. And if you don't do it, no one's going to do it. And if they tweet too much, it's not because they're drinking Cabernet Sauvignon. No. It's a nuance. Bad beer. Bad beer. They're drinking. Yeah. Sovignon. No. It's a nuance. Bad beer. Bad beer. They're drinking, yeah.

So, the internet's serving you good? Very good. And I first sort of, that's how I rose, is really through creating a website that had videos and animation sort of before anybody really was doing that. Really? So, this is at a time when you might not have been able to get gigs on stage? It was the late 90s.

And then it first started going around actually virally. And then I got an email from... You are an OG. I'm an OG. I got an email from Pete Townsend from The Who. That was sort of like one of the first big things. Whoa. Wow.

Was it some joke about The Who? No, he was like, there's a thing on your website that I like. It was just really crazy. So for me, I think the democratization of the internet has been amazing. It's helped me completely do everything I've done. Cool. Cool. We've got to wind this up now. You got any concluding thoughts?

Mr. Professor? I think that Alexis Ohanian used the permissionless internet to invent something we couldn't have ever predicted. And that the public he enabled also helped him invent that. That's the future of the Internet, collaboration. David Weinberger, who's a wonderful professor at Harvard,

says that the smartest person in the room now is the room itself, the network that puts all of our brains together, and that's what Reddit does. Now, were you the one who told me that it took 500 years for... 50 years after the invention of the Gutenberg press for anyone to think to invent the newspaper. The newspaper. So I got that from you. About 400 years before it became the mass media product we know now.

And so we are so young on the internet right now. It's 1472 in Gutenberg years. It's 1472 in Gutenberg years. And so we're still... We don't know what the internet is yet. We're still inventing it. We have no idea what it is yet. We still think it's a newfangled book.

Yeah. Can't wait till it merges with humans. Very excited. Yeah, for me, I don't... The internet was never sort of so much a destination for me as when I put things on the internet, they were things I was doing anyway, thoughts I was having already.

And I have tweet like thoughts every day of my life. I'm sorry. And I just. You can get a pill for that. Is there a word for that disease? And so I thought, let me just put it on Twitter. And that seemed to resonate with people. And so I, for me, the internet

is an extension of what I am rather than a replacement of what I might be. The internet connects you with people. The internet is not wires, it's people. And so the magazine Wired, I thought they would have changed their name by now. Although they will have. I actually proposed that they should have changed the name to Wireless, but they didn't like it. I told them, yeah, yeah, Wireless. Then it sounds like it's like a phone or router magazine.

You want to read a boring router magazine. We've got to close that down. That's our show. And thanks to our guest, Jeff Jarvis, for being on StarTalk a second time. Thanks. Do I get to do a third? Yeah, I think you did okay this time.

And thanks to Alexis Ohanian. Pull me up. Upvote Jeff Jarvis' presence on StarTalk. And thanks in the internet space to Alexis Ohanian for agreeing to sit down with me and have that chat. Eugene, as always, thanks for being on here.

And I, as always, bid you to keep looking up.