r/findbostonbombers

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We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

An acquaintance noted: “Blue Tracksuit Guy Identified…ends up being a local kid,” Reddit, April 18, 2013, accessed through Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20130420030905/http://www.reddit.com/r/findbostonbombers/comments/1cl3cj/blue_tracksuit_guy_identifiedends_up_being_a/. “Bag men: Feds seek these two”: Larry Celona, “Authorities circulate photos of two men spotted carrying bags near site of Boston bombings,” New York Post, April 18, 2013. deeply fearful of appearing in public: “Blue Tracksuit Guy Identified,” Reddit. It included an email link: r/findbostonbombers subreddit, accessed through Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20130418155254/http://www.reddit.com/r/findbostonbombers/. “At one point I was banning”: “I was one of the moderators of r/findbostonbombers,” Reddit, February 24, 2014.

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Finally keep in mind that most or all of the “suspects” being discussed are, in all likelihood, innocent people and that they should be treated as innocent until they are proven guilty. The moderators also wrote, “r/findbostonbombers is a discussion forum, not a journalistic media outlet. We do not strive, nor pretend, to release journalist-quality content for the sake of informing the public.” It included an email link to the Boston FBI and implored readers to send any major information about the identities of the bombers to the FBI or Boston Police Department. Within a day, r/findbostonbombers was an accessible source for tips, analysis, and speculation, and reporters, eager for any leads, any coverage related to Boston, flocked there.

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The 117th Boston Marathon a twenty-three-year-old professional poker player: John Herrman, “The Man Behind the Internet’s Hunt for the Boston Bomber,” BuzzFeed, April 17, 2013. created the subreddit r/findbostonbombers: Ibid. in 2012, one gearhead: “Car part left at hit and run scene, any idea what it belongs to? It’s a right front headlight,” Reddit, December 18, 2012. “Does anyone remember Richard Jewell?”: “Does anyone remember Richard Jewell?,” Reddit, April 17, 2013, accessed through Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20130419234150/http://www.reddit.com/r/findbostonbombers/comments/1civf6/does_anyone_remember_richard_jewell/. “basically every brown person wearing a backpack”: Adrian Chen, “Your Guide to the Boston Marathon Bombing Amateur Internet Crowd-Sleuthing,” Gawker, April 17, 2013.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

But the tale is wrong: in reality, the community and the moderators quickly shut down the idea as being impractical, insensitive, and very dangerous. “Cloudmakers tried to solve 9/11” is a great story, but it’s completely false. Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for the poster child for online sleuthing gone wrong, the r/findbostonbombers Reddit community.39 In the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, the community was created as a way to spread news and exchange theories about the perpetrators. Initially, moderators and users acted responsibly by not publishing the personal information of “suspects” and leaving the sleuthing to law enforcement authorities.

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If this wasn’t reminiscent enough of the dystopian game show in the movie The Running Man, it soon emerged that they’d identified the wrong person—though not after whipping up a manhunt that, by their own account, involved 1.4 million people. There’s a parallel between the seemingly unmoderated theorists of r/findbostonbombers and the Citizen app and those in QAnon: none feel any responsibility for spreading unsupported speculation as fact. What they do feel is that anything should be solvable, as Laura Hall, immersive environment and narrative designer, describes: “There’s a general sense of, ‘This should be solveable/findable/etc’ that you see in lots of reddit communities for unsolved mysteries and so on.

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The editor of the Telegraph, Chris Evans, said the story was a “complete misrepresentation,” but regardless, the plan would only be the same practice laid down by Gawker Media in 2008, which directly tied its writers’ pay to pageviews.85 The chase for pageviews can have consequences beyond encouraging clickbait journalism. Writing about the r/findbostonbombers debacle in 2013, Jay Caspian Kang wondered why so many journalists from different backgrounds felt the need to tweet unconfirmed information about the identity of the bombers. He concluded, “It helps to envision modern journalism as a kind of video game. If you’re part of the Internet media, everything you put out into the world comes with its own scoring system.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, British Empire, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, disinformation, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, lifelogging, machine readable, mass incarceration, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, r/findbostonbombers, Scientific racism, security theater, sexual politics, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, US Airways Flight 1549, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Works Progress Administration

On April 22, 2013, Reddit general manager Erik Martin released an apology for the site’s role in what he termed the “online witch hunts and dangerous speculation” that occurred during the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing where users of the site (“Redditors”) incorrectly identified suspects using the /r/findbostonbombers subreddit page, a dedicated Google Doc, photographs uploaded to Flikr, and other crowdsourced information. See “Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis,” Blog. Reddit, April 22, 2013, accessed February 1, 2015, http://www.redditblog.com/2013/04/reflections-on-recent-boston-crisis.html. 52. Lyon, The Electronic Eye, 48. 53.