Social News Aggregation delivers bottom up news, and all the challenges that comes with it
Social Media Club (find a chapter near you) put on yet another great event in last Thursday’s event at the Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale. The theme, a focus on social or bottom up news, traditional news, and citizen journalism.
Each of the respective companies had an opportunity to share their insight, about their products, and a healthy conversation. Presenters included: Karen Brophy, Yahoo! News, Amy Dalton, Topix.com Steve Huffman, Reddit.com, Jay Adelson, Digg.com, Dan Gillmor, Center For Citizen Media. Amy Dalton told me that this list of Silicon Valley events was very helpful for her planning.
“Social News Aggregators offer individuals more than a chance to consume news, they also offer an opportunity to participate, weigh in on it, contribute to it and interact around it. But each site differs and the communities that form around social news sites are unique.
What sparks the growth of an online community around news and current affairs content?
How are online community and user expectations changing? How do site creators and editors maintain a balance between their original vision, and responsiveness to their online community? What can mainstream media learn from users of social news sites? “
[Social news delivers the democracy of information, but with it comes the human instinct to manipulate and ‘game’ systems, the battle will never end]
Key Trends
-Many communities have rowdy members, users are often anonymous
-It was suggested by forcing users to use real names, it could yield better commentary
-Gaming of ‘voting’ type systems is inevitable.
-Members spend a lot of time, effort to earn points or reputation in systems
-Yahoo News had the largest visitorship
-Reddit team was more worried about users getting negative points than positive, as it was an indicator of something going wrong
-Each of the site has increasing growth, they shared numbers at the end
-Digg and Reddit communities have very similar demographics, often resulting in friction.
4 Comments so far
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I love your quote, “Social news delivers the democracy of information, but with it comes the human instinct to manipulate and ‘game’ systems, the battle will never end.” Really? Hmm. Reminds me of our old free speech debate.
That’s one of the challenges of an open system. I trust about 10% of the content I read on the internet, if that. I think it comes down to trusting the source. And, unfortunately, social networks (and news sites) tend to breed mistrust rather than instill trust. Some are better than others.
If anything, I think things have gotten worse in the last year since our online discussion. Spam aside, the amount of blatant self-promotion on the internet is discouraging.
Viewing life through the internet is akin to viewing a basketball game through a straw. You only see what you see, without context and a broader perspective. Fortunately, as humans, most people tend to seek the truth and inherently sense when they’re being deceived.
Maybe, technology will ultimately help us filter out the junk (better) to get to the trusted, reliable content. It kind of reminds me of that quote about lies, damn lies and statistics. Don’t believe everything you read, especially when it’s coming from the anonymous masses!
Thanks Rick
Humans have a way of finding away any walls put up by other humans.
Re: points 1 & 2.
I got some troll on my website today, bashing me as he bashed so many other liberal blogs, and among his blog criticism was lambasting large community blogs that required registration to comment. This from a guy whose blog was registered by anonymous proxy and contained no identifying information whatsoever.
Blog credibility today is about accountability. I had, for a while, thought about doing my damnedest to expunge my real identity from my blog (just at least to limit the casual Googler’s access) and starting a separate, “official” blog under my namesake domain. But come on: in the age of this emerging “new media” concept, what do we have as credentials other than our very name? And in my political realm, without full disclosure of from whence you might be deriving income or inside information (i.e., something that can be traced to your RL identity), your site is so much electronic toilet paper.
It’s great to know about it. People now have more ways of communicating with each other.