Cmdrtaco may have a point | Hacker News Reader

Cmdrtaco may have a point

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16 pointsmqt7 comments

I saw that comment from Cmdrtaco the other day and thought that it was a real good summary of several "news" aggregator sites.

My slashdot user # is like 32000-something. It would have been lower, but I lurked for a year before actually signing up. Then when digg and reddit came around I sort of abandoned /., the news on these new sites was NOW, and it was voted on by The People, not decided by The Editors.

And then a couple of funny pics made the top stories, and that was a nice break from just news. And then another funny pic, and then one I had just seen the other day, and then one from 1985, and then...

I think the algorithms behind Digg and reddit, or the stories being promoted, show that as a whole society is pretty basic and easily entertained. Hackers, BizDev folks, Founders - we are the minority out there.

When these progressive, techy, news-aggregator sites first emerged, they held "our" news, because "we" ran them. Then, they were diluted as more (I'll call them "normal") people globbed on to the concept.

Soon, LOLCat pictures and videos of stupid stunts out rank a security flaw in FF, or news of a software project being acquired.

This is where I think /. has the edge again, geeky-hacky-founder-types select the stories and weed out the LOLCat pics from the submissions. It's not perfect, but it's good for now. Combine that with Hacker News, and some other "underground" news sites, and I guess we come to the conclusion that just as "we" stay on the leading edge of technology, "we" will have to stay on the leading edge of news sites as well.

I don't know, http://programming.reddit.com is lightyears better than http://developers.slashdot.org

I would rather dig through (no pun intended) fifty articles a day for five good ones, than have one mediocre article per week based on what they think is interesting.

Here's something I thought of today whilst reading the gripes of reddit: their main issue can't be the community, but instead the amount of power they give individuals within the community.

Reddit could look to Wikipedia of all places and come up with some ways to give individuals within their community more clout over the stuff that hits the top few pages.

Doesn't Digg do this, or is it just the fact that high ranking Digg people have more followers who want to "help out"?

Giving people more power makes it break much quicker. You'll soon see upvotes being sold, etc, etc, etc.

cmdrtaco does have a point. These community news sites are great when the community reflects your views, but once the community grows they stake to not reflect your views.

One way to correct this is to only get news from a group that is similar to you (for some definition of 'similar'). One attempt to do this is my Wildfire application for Facebook which shows you news from your friends.

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.ht...

John.

This problem would be solved if the recommendations, based on what you upmodded/downmodded in the past, actually worked (in reddit they never did). The book recommendations on amazon are often quite good, so it seems like this should be doable.

yep. i'm here because this site has the same feel as reddit did in the beginning, which is now more or less useless for me, sadly.

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