Reddit Digest: January 20, 2012

With 30 million unique visitors and close to 2 billion page views a month, it’s safe to say a lot happens on the link-sharing and discussion site Reddit every day. There are more than 90,000 sections on the site; a single discussion alone can sometimes attract more than 10,000 comments.

How can anyone keep track of it all? Our daily Reddit Digest highlights the most interesting or important discussions from around the site—every morning.

• AskReddit has a good discussion on why the government was able to shut down MegaUpload, and how that’s different from how bad SOPA and PIPA are supposed to be. (r/AskReddit)

• Ron Wyden (D-OR), a real-life anti-SOPA senator rather than an another prospective one, created an account just to say thanks to r/politics for the blackout. “By going dark[…], Reddit and thousands of other websites showed that the Internet is not just a platform for ideas, commerce, and expression, but also for political action.” (r/politics)

• Redditor balkandishlex in r/Australia talked a young woman down from the ledge–almost literally. She’d threatened suicide, so he “found one of her relatives through Facebook, got to her LinkedIn, called her and told her to call the police right away,” he said. The woman’s daughter told a radio station “Social media can do great things.” (r/Australia)

• Neither Reddit and Wikipedia are blacked out any longer, but what if they were, and what if you wanted to have Reddit content explained in the Wikipedia format? Have no fear: the Redditpedia has arrived! “I’m just an infinitesimally small portion of the potential userbase,” wrote creator Choffman. “There are so many other ideas that could be implemented.” (r/self)

• r/Music addresses a possible way to compensate record labels for the albums they download: Would you tolerate a Hulu-like system where you had to listen to an ad before listening? (r/music)

• In response to of the AMA yesterday with Michael Ham, a neuroscientist from New Mexico who wants to run for senate, one redditor answers the question: Why isn’t being scientist considered a good qualification to run for office? (r/depthhub)