What is wrong with social news?

October 7, 2008 1:57 PM

What are the main issues you have with current social news websites?

I have an idea for a new brand of social news aggregation and am trying to perform a little basic research. I am generally curious as well. Please help out if you can.

posted by bettershredder to Society & Culture (13 answers total)

I mainly read reddit with a bit of Ycombinator:

Too prone to emotional gaming ("vote up if you love puppies"), a million duplicates, which I actually feel is due to karma-whoring/need to be the first poster, and cliques drowning out the moderate voices (see: 9/11 truthers on reddit).
posted by Lemurrhea at 2:16 PM on October 7, 2008

they're full of idiots.

also: paultards (still!)
posted by borkingchikapa at 2:24 PM on October 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

As more people use them, the "news" turns into a lowest-common-denominator mix of funny pictures and politics-themed YouTube clips.
posted by martinrebas at 2:33 PM on October 7, 2008

Too much "news."
posted by rhizome at 2:35 PM on October 7, 2008

They're irrelevant to people like me who live in small not-very-online communities and yet they pitch themselves willynilly as if this sort of thing is good for everyone.
posted by jessamyn at 2:37 PM on October 7, 2008

Just when I start to like 'em, some bozo gets the idea to monetize the thing, and then there are ads all over the place, or premium content, or some damn thing, and I'm disgusted.
posted by box at 2:39 PM on October 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

The reddit comment recommendation algorithm is so busted. It promotes trite little jokes to the top instead of useful commentary. Case in point, the top ranking response to "Anything you ever wanted to ask a console game programmer?" is "asl".

Ask a game developer.
posted by rrenaud at 2:52 PM on October 7, 2008

Ron Paul
Obama
Apple
4chan
Linux
Linus
Truthers
Not funny macros
Links to blog reposts instead of original articles
Links to bad writing (Huffington Post staff) rather than the exact same thing covered by people who know how to write an interesting article (New York Times) that doesn't punch you in the dick with an overt partisan slant and disregard for nuance
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:54 PM on October 7, 2008

They are all full of morons. Community moderation is biased towards the vocal minority of said morons (Paultards, "AMAZING PIX OF", "Vote up if...", etc.). Digg and Reddit were awesome when they started out. As relatively small communities of like-minded people, they tended to have a high signal-to-noise ration, for me at least. Fark and Slashdot grew enormously from their beginnings but still maintained good content by having the front-page content selected by a few moderators. The comments got out of control to the point where I hardly read them, but the stories are still (mostly) selected by Drew and CmrdTaco.
posted by indyz at 3:04 PM on October 7, 2008

Also, rampant misuse of the word "hilarious".
posted by martinrebas at 3:26 PM on October 7, 2008

Links to bad writing (Huffington Post staff) rather than the exact same thing covered by people who know how to write an interesting article (New York Times) that doesn't punch you in the dick with an overt partisan slant and disregard for nuance

Thats the problem. IMHO
posted by itsamonkeytree at 3:56 PM on October 7, 2008

The echo chamber effect. Read only left-wing sites and you'll think all of the Republican supporters are drooling morons. Read only right-wing sites and you'll think all of the Democratic supporters are drooling morons. Don't go telling me that only one of these sides is right. Neither of them addresses the strong versions of the opposing viewpoint.
posted by PercussivePaul at 4:10 PM on October 7, 2008

Look into the literature on social information processing. For instance, Kristina Lerman's recent work should interest you.
posted by PueExMachina at 9:52 PM on October 7, 2008