Reddit, Wed It, and Fuhgeddit

I love reddit.com...mostly.

It's a social news site: if you find something online that you think others should see, you post it to reddit and others see it. Simple like that. There's more, of course--the things I hate about reddit.com. I'll mention them later. For now, suffice it to say I don't have to bother with any of those things if I don't want to, and so...

I love reddit.com. Mostly.

It's an inexhaustible supply of blog topics, for one thing. I've used reddit as a gateway for nearly every post I've written since I first found mention of the place on Peter's blog. There's interesting stuff posted there every few minutes, it seems like.

Today's topic: the high cost of weddings. The guy whose blog ended up cited on reddit.com claims to have done a lot of research to discover that the average cost of a wedding today is $28,600. I found the site he got that figure from with two clicks: it's CNN. Which tells me the data's probably valid, or close to it. (You've gotta be careful on the Internet: there's precious little peer review for any stat or assertion you might find.)

Let's assume that figure's correct. $28,600. In U.S. dollars.

Holy crap.

Granted, I got married in 2000...but we spent just over six thousand dollars on our wedding and that included a six-day honeymoon. To be perfectly honest, if my wife had wanted to blow even twenty grand on one day I would have had serious second thoughts about marrying her. (And she says the same of me.)

How did we do it? Well, we got married in a Legion hall--that saved at least a few hundred bucks. My father-in-law, who counts butchering among his many skills, supplied the meat for the wedding dinner. Eva's grandma made her dress. Our camerawork was done by a friend of the family. The ceremony music was burned to a CD and played on a ghetto blaster...maybe the sound quality wasn't perfect but the music was.
My mother-in-law used an "in" to get the wedding cake at a discount; she also made half the favours (chocolate roses) while a friend made the other half (beeswax candles) as a wedding present to us. And that $1500 honeymoon: five nights at the Bonnie View Inn's honeymoon chalet. Every time I go to plan a vacation, I have to fight down the urge to book another five nights here.

I kind of agree with that blogger: if you're spending thirty grand on a wedding, what you're mostly doing is showing off. I'd go further. If you feel the need to show off by spending that kind of coin, you're almost certainly trying to mask a whole host of insecurities...some of which probably have something to do with your marriage. Marriage, you know, the thing you wake up to the day after the wedding's over? And then every day after that, supposedly for the rest of your life?

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Back to reddit.com. This particular blog wasn't political. But there is a lot of political content on that site...and absolutely every last bit of it has a decided progressive/liberal/leftist bent. And this is apparently fine and dandy with reddit.com's readership.
What they mean by a "social" news site is simple. You read an article. If you like it, you can "upvote" it, and if enough people "upvote" something it gets displayed more prominently on the reddit.com homepage. You can also comment on any submission, and comments are subjected to the same popularity contest. If enough people like your submissions, you gain "karma" points and status.

I don't bother with any of this anymore. I tried commenting on a few of the more blatant left-leaning submissions, thinking a different perspective would be welcomed. Boy, was I wrong: I got flamed to ashes. There was definitely a sense of "what the hell are you doing on our site?" that I found really irritating.

I also find the whole "popularity" aspect really annoying. It smacks of American Idol. I've seen about three minutes of that show before I realized what I was watching and frantically changed the channel. You'd think I'd like the Idol programs: I'm intensely musical and appreciate a good voice. But there are two things conspiring to limit my interest to less than zero.

One is the public evisceration of people Cowell et al don't like. I hate to see people humiliated. This quirk of mine (well, I think I'm normal: you aliens who laugh at other people's pain are the insane ones) makes it all but impossible for me to watch most sitcoms, and I flat-out refuse to watch verbal lashes doled out to somebody who just had the guts to get up and sing in front of millions and millions of people. You try that, Mr. Cowell.

But the other, more relevant thing spoiling those Idol programs is all that rigged telephone voting, oftentimes resulting in the real singer being discarded in favour of the hunk or the babe.

I don't mind everything I do or say online being examined. Nor do I mind comments directed my way, no matter how negative they may be. (If I didn't want feedback, I wouldn't blog--this thing is, after all, a public document.) What bothers me, I think, is this whole quest for "karma/status". After the better part of a lifetime chasing that particular rabbit without success, it dawned on me over a year or so that I was tired, and furthermore, I didn't even like rabbit. Now whenever I see popularity contests, my first instinct is to run as fast as I can in the opposite direction.

So I stay away from the "social" part of reddit.com and just concentrate on the "news". After all, as Lily Tomlin said, "the trouble with the ratrace is that even if you win, you're still a rat."