Phillip Winn on The Wisdom of Crowds
Check out this really smart and comprehensive look at “the wisdom of crowds” and how it applies to popular social news sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Netscape, written by my man over at Blogcritics, Technical Director Phillip Winn.
If you’re into social news, or websites where the community (in theory!) controls the front page by voting or ranking content submissions, it’s an exciting time because we’re at the very very beginning. Digg, the most popular social news site, is making it up as it goes along just like everyone else and is certainly making some mistakes and taking its lumps along the way.
Personally, I tend to visit Reddit the most. While I appreciate the stripped down and clean design, it’s the interesting and eclectic mix of stories that keep me coming back. So in the end social news sites are more about the people who make them up than anything else. Which is why I think that there’s room for a dozen or more popular social news sites in this space, but that’s a topic for another day!
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May 18th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Wow, thanks!
I think I spend the most time on Reddit, though I actually like Digg better. Does that make sense? It’s because things show up on Digg’s front page slowly and stay in order, so I check a couple of times a day and work my way down to wherever I left off, and I’m done.
On Reddit, I’m required to do a bit more active interaction, so it soaks up more time. I suppose in a way that should help the content there, though it still seems to end up with juvenile political nonsense all too often.
May 18th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Eric, were you at the Personal Democracy conference her in NYC today? Lots of talk about wisdom of crowds as an answer to fixing our broken (political) journalism. I’ll be writing it up tomorrow.
May 20th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Reddit bugs me a bit. They banned me for a while (think I’ve been reinstated) but the worst part was: no one told me! So I could literally sign in, submit stories and they would appear on my screen - BUT a friend told me they weren’t showing up on his screen! Very underhanded way of dealing with people you want to ban (still don’t know why) if you ask me.
May 22nd, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Phillip - Yes, I like Digg’s style of front page display as well. It’s the story selection that brings me back to Reddit most, which draws back to my feeling that a social news site’s greatest strengh (or weakness) is the community that makes it up.
Sprague - I was not there, I’m out in LA!
allsux - I think all of the major social news sites can do a better job of being communicative with their members. I’ve been very critical of netscape for this reason in the past, though they seem to be making strides of late.