Why Reddit Loves Marijuana Legalization

Reddit just happens to be one of my favorite sites on the web, and I'm loving it even more after watching this interview with co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who discusses pot's popularity on the net and Reddit's own conflict with its corporate sponsor over the censorship of ads for the Just Say Now campaign..

What these guys did is insanely cool, but it's also a testament to the issue's surging momentum that Reddit probably didn't feel they had much choice. The whole point of the site is to let users vote for what's important to them and promote the most popular content and ideas to the front page. These people are super hostile to authority and censorship in particular. Had Reddit simply stood by as their corporate owners blocked ads for marijuana legalization, such a show of weakness could have dealt a substantial blow to everything the site stood for.

Long-time readers may remember this post in which I discussed the popularity of marijuana reform on Digg and Reddit, resulting in an ironic, but not-so-surprising flood of visitors from those sites. Interestingly, I haven't been receiving quite the same volume of viral traffic the last couple years, largely because the major news outlets are doing a much better job of covering the marijuana legalization debate and inadvertently stealing my traffic in the process. I miss the attention sometimes, but I'm hardly about to complain that the mainstream media is finally doing its part to amplify the argument for reform.