
Listeners of 'Serial' Turn into Detectives, With Troubling Results - Thevet
http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/nov/07/serial-listeners-detectives-troubling-results
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malloreon
I haven't done any outside reading on "Serial" but if you haven't checked it
out I highly recommend it.

Also, starting with episode 5, the Slate folks put out a companion series,
"Serial Spoiler Special." After listening to each episode, Slate writers talk
about the episode. Not just going over facts, but analyzing Serial as a
storytelling medium for true crime stories.

Also highly recommended.

Serial:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/serial/id917918570?mt=2](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/serial/id917918570?mt=2)

Slate's Serial Spoiler Special: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/slates-
serial-spoiler-sp...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/slates-serial-
spoiler-specials/id935063801?mt=2)

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brown9-2
Kind of fascinating that the Slate podcast about a podcast is now ranked #8 in
iTunes Top Podcasts list.

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judk
Serial is troubling. It's creepy to have a relatively recent event, with
affected people still alive and struggling, used as pop culture entertainment.
It's worse than reality TV.

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balls187
Investigative journalism is now pop culture entertainment?

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oh_sigh
It's not investigative journalism. It's investigative story telling.

A journalist would most likely not string the most interesting details of
their findings out over 3 months.

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judk
More importantly, investigative journalism is a call to action for justice,
not a call to snuff voyeurism.

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mintplant
> The subreddit has become a recommended resource for anyone listening to the
> podcast. It boasts 5,638 subscribers as of this writing, but its readers are
> probably far more numerous. A lot of journalists, I can testify, are
> watching it closely.

The traffic stats for /r/SerialPodcast are public, and yes, the number of
readers is many multiples of the subscriber count.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/serialpodcast/about/traffic](http://www.reddit.com/r/serialpodcast/about/traffic)

Amazing that they have 100k+ monthly uniques vs. ~7k registered subscribers.
The former number tends to be bigger than the latter for subreddits, but not
by a factor of ten!

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shalmanese
It was the #2 Google result for serial podcast (now bumped to #3 by the
guardian article) which drives a lot of traffic.

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DanBC
> Redditors have also long observed what they call an “anti-doxxing policy”,
> which roughly means they’re against publishing the identifying details of
> people who don’t want to be identified.

Reddit admins sometimes don't let you post your own information. There have
been a couple of subs with directories of useful users and their contact
details who've had to remove those directories.

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SixSigma
I belong to such a subreddit. It is forbidden to include any reddit username
inposts to try and stop brigading (invading another subreddit en-masse and
upsetting people).

We are regularly brigaded ourselves and have waves of mass downvoting. We just
collectively find it amusing, karma is really not important and a lot of
people use alts anyway.

We are often threatened with being doxxed although I'm not aware of any actual
cases.

Our own users are fairly well behaved, as far as we can tell and the sub is
the one i feel the greatest sense of actual community.

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cbd1984
> karma is really not important

It isn't up to the point discussions are buried because every post is
downvoted below the threshold. I don't know if mods can stop that or what, but
it is a legitimate effect of negative karma.

I also don't know if enough negative karma can cause someone to be hellbanned,
or if that requires more manual intervention.

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SixSigma
We have great moderators, and legit posts get enough upvotes to bring them
back into viewing territory.

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l33tbro
Is it really "viral"? I think there's probably some kind of confirmation bias
going on for the journalist, where participating in the subreddit makes it
seem more popular than it is.The series has its moments, but has definitely
dragged on way too long.

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arrrg
Very popular without a big marketing campaign. It can also only be used to
describe things that are still relatively new. That would be my definition of
viral (or the way I perceive that word being commonly used today).

That Serial is just that can easily be argued. (I also very much disagree with
you about it dragging on for way too long – and I don’t think qualitative
statements like that have anything to do whether or not something is viral
anyway. That is just so irrelevant. To me the average quality has been higher
than This American Life, and that’s quite the achievement.)

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raldi
_> Very popular without a big marketing campaign. [...] That would be my
definition of viral (or the way I perceive that word being commonly used
today)._

Really? From my perception of how the word is commonly used, anything whose
popularity is being driven by a marketing campaign is about as unviral as it
gets.

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quaunaut
I think you both agree- he said 'without' a big marketing campaign.

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j2kun
How exactly are the results troubling? More like, the results have the
potential to be troubling. But rather I see people like "Adnan's best friend"
doing "ask me" threads on /r/serialpodcast and it doesn't seem harmful at all.

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wheaties
My android reported that this website infected it with a virus. This part of
the show?

