Social Media, Reddit | featured news

The family of Sunil Tripathi endured much emotional pain as speculation swirled that the still-missing Brown University student was a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing. Users of the Reddit social news site fanned the flames — and now they, along with the site's leadership, are apologizing to Tripathi's family.

The social news site Reddit is being hit with what the company called a “malicious” denial of service attack, first disclosed via its official Twitter account Friday. The company first disclosed that it was being targeted with an attack on Friday around 6:30 a.m. Eastern.

Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz's request for a plea deal was turned down by federal prosecutors just two days before he committed suicide as he faced 30 years in jail for stealing academic papers, his lawyer has revealed.

A co-founder of Reddit and activist who fought to make online content free to the public has been found dead, authorities confirmed Saturday, prompting an outpouring of grief from prominent voices on the intersection of free speech and the Web.

Last June, a young woman in Texas uploaded a Justin Bieber fan video. She seemed a little .... unhinged. "I just made a list [of] all our future kids names: Bartholemew, Clarence, Steven, Bryce," she sings, eyes wide. The video was posted to Reddit in a thread called "Overly Attached Girlfriend." In 48 hours, it picked up over 1 million views. Within days, the media was running stories about it.

Last to join the party, I've just recently started using Reddit. What I thought was a bunch of disjointed information has turned out to be an interesting source for work and fun. That kind of crowd-sourced information is making its way to the military through a Pentagon-created site called Eureka. The new site will join the group of military-friendly social sites under the label "milSuite," which resemble Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia and only carry unclassified material.

Reddit, built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community of 20 million users a month, is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy.

In another social-media first, President Barack Obama took to Reddit today to become the first sitting head of state to moderate the site's "AMA," or, ask me anything, series. 
The chat lasted an hour, and got so much attention that it shut the site down during his post. 

Reddit has lifted its ban on popular news publication The Atlantic, thus allowing its users to submit links to the community news sharing site once again. The news publication — along with BusinessWeek, Phys.org, GlobalPost, Discovery News, ScienceDaily, and others — was first put on a domain blacklist by Reddit about a month ago, as VentureBeat previously reported. Reddit management determined that these sites were guilty of artificially promoting their content on the site.