Reddit flexes its muscle over net neutrality

Reddit is often dismissed as the digital version of a noisy bar brawl between nerds and misfits. But when it comes to issues like net neutrality, the site has a way of highlighting not just what’s important about the web but also what average citizens of the internet can do about it, something few mainstream media outlets tend to do. When Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai announced his intention to loosen the existing rules on net neutrality, most traditional news sites published “explainers” describing what net neutrality is and why some believe it to be an important way of protecting Internet freedom. Most of these (with a few exceptions) were of the standard “one side says this, the other side says that” format. The front page of Reddit, meanwhile— a leaderboard for a wide variety of links from funny GIFs to personal stories—displayed an almost unbroken stream of posts about net neutrality, and specifically, the senators and representatives who had failed to defend the principle.