The challenges with “social news”
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010I’m a fan of social media, but one thing that aggravates me sometimes is the idiocy of the content out there.
- A poor lost cow was found; won’t you adopt him?
- Barack Obama Barack Obama Barack Obama
- Drinking out of cups
The same affliction absolutely affects social news sites as well, and is one of the reasons I took up reading the Wall Street Journal.
Digg’s site title is the following: “The Latest News Headlines, Videos and Images.” Unfortunately, the “News Headlines” portion of that title does not explain the fact that the “News Headlines” on the site are driven socially and therefore subject to the whims of the mob. When the mob votes on what it deems popular, the result is no longer “News.” News, as defined at Wikipedia, is “the communication of information on current events” using various broadcasting avenues. What happens at Digg is very different. Funny images, celebrity gossip, duplicate stories, and severely leaned (one way or another) political rants abound. These are not news stories. They are fun, and can be a nice distraction during a lunch break or in the evening, but it’s not news.
News is thoroughly investigated, expertly and concisely written, and presented with no propaganda goals.
At least Reddit doesn’t make any pretenses at being a news site; their site title is “what’s new online!” which describes exactly what you can find on their site.
Letting the mob at your content is tough; you could be praised one day, and thrown down the next. Journalists (reporters and investigators of real News) need to have thick skins; they could write a story that is 100% fact and still get hate mail from people that disagree with the truth. For having the sort of integrity to do that gets my total respect, and I think it’s a sad thing that newspapers are shutting their doors because of the free (and more fun) alternative of finding a new picture of a cat “hazing” a “cheezburger.”
