Dinner-and-a-Movie Theory: Why Reddit Gets it Backwards

I agree and disagree.

You are right in that the people shape the discussion, but saying that the current aggregators have it right because of thus is more like complacency: they can definitely be better. Looking back at how discussion systems evolved over the years, it's easy to see that small steps have been taken to improve the user experience be enforcing an overall higher quality of content.

Since users shape the community, you have two choices in dealing with an evolving site: keep your initial vision by implementing rules and potentially alienating certain user groups; or letting your site adapt to the users. Both are valid approaches. Slashdot takes the former, because it has moderators, and digg takes the latter, so it's userbase keeps growing while the quality keeps dropping. I imagine reddit would take the latter path too. news.yc is also facing the same kind of change. Recalling the bunch of "delete me" posts last week, it seems like quality control is done mostly by self-policing of some sort.

It's an issue of how much control and what tastes the users have, and what mechanisms have been implemented to strengthen or weaken the expression these tastes in the system. Most discussion sites fall into two extremes. Total moderator control, or total user control. A very powerful alternative doesn't simply lie in the middle; it shifts back and forth. This is the logical next step.

I think linking to a discussion about a topic is better than just linking to the topic but is still flawed. If you think about the scope of what's happening, the scope is usually very tight. At most, the conversation goes on for a few days, then essentially fades away as the topic (really, the post the comments are connected with) slides down the list and gets buried.

Once the post has been fully buried, the conversation has effectively stopped. The thing that would be really great would be to link prior conversations to new, but related topics. Let's say that next week it turns out that Imus made those comments under duress. Some lunatic pointed a gun at him and forced him to say those things. Instead of rehashing all that stuff again, it'd be great to dredge that conversation up as a starting point.

I know I'm not making this very clear. But I tried.

Basically. Let's say you have one NYTimes article. There might be thirty discussions about this article scattered across usenet and the web. So on average, the best discussion will most likely not be on any one site consistently. The probability that a single set of people will create the most intelligent discussion about a wide range of topics is just very low. So yes, basically, that it would be better to link to the best discussion for each article.