Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. - Matthew 7.15

The Internet has turned out to be a godsend for the free expression of ideas. Unfortunately, most of those ideas are completely idiotic. Even worse, the Internet takes these misinformed and prejudiced beliefs, called "memes", and amplifies them in echo chambers called "forums", where they become the accepted reality of a vast hivemind known as a "social network".

The center of this hive is a web site called reddit. Here, conventional wisdom is reinforced via repeated snarky commenting and all dissenting opinion is crushed into oblivion by a host of anonymous users busily forging the modern zeitgeist. This world view being somewhat warped, an alternate version is manufactured at a web site called The Huffington Post, a sort of anti-reddit, and in this way important issues relating to the rights and responsibilities of individuals, personal privacy, gender relations, economic justice, and the role of government are carefully worked out in an Internet-wide, free spirited discussion, as we enter our Brave New World.

There is a generation gap at work in the conflict between the redditors and the anti-redditors. The hivemind results from the activity of the young adult Millennial generation, as they upvote and downvote one another's comments, forming a consenus, in a sort of democratization of informed opinion. When this opinion is opposed by the elder Boomer generation, much more used to thinking for themselves and ignoring everyone else, they attack what they see as evidence of a degraded culture in scathing editorials.

The mid-life Generation X plays the role of either enablers or gawkers. If they're participating, they're probably in it for the money.

Here are some notable news, gossip, humor and discussion sites, by generation. Intentionally left out are old media web portals, ie. newspaper and TV network sites. Also no blogging sites - that is a can of worms.