Failure by design

If you haven’t heard of Reddit or Digg they are social networking news sites that in my opinion have the potential to break down traditional news. They don’t have the overhead that many media outlets have and also don’t have to rely on the personal tastes of one editor to find out what is good or bad news. The idea is that people submit articles that they personally like and then others vote the article up or down if they like it. You get points for recommending articles that other people also liked and these points give you more recommending power per se when you post another article. Now I am going to talk about the problems and how this can be solved.

Now the problem with this is that these sites generate a LOT of traffic to websites. And traffic equates to money in this world of Adsense, chitika and YPN. Due to this interest in posting articles that get to the top and getting money, people have begun posting things to benefit their own personal agenda. “Karma whoring” is a term used when a person posts an article with the sole intent of getting points. They post no content, and come up with a provocative title that gets people to respond. While this may be fun to click on so you feel your voice is getting heard, what this does is clutter the front page with content-less garbage.

Another commonly used tactic is link-baiting. This is when you post a funny picture or movie clip and then attach a link to your own for profit website in the hopes of getting traffic. These typically go well, with at least one or two of these topics on the front page at any point in time.

My personal biggest problem with this is the political agenda that gets manipulated up to the top of the list. If you look on Reddit or Digg at any point in time, you will notice that at least half of the articles are politically motivated. This site is not a way for you to advertise your political views especially views that are limited to your own personal area. I find myself having to constantly sift through links related to Obama and Hillary Clinton, when their current debate has very little to do with me.

I really think that for Reddit and Digg to succeed and not get run into the ground they need to change. They need to allow readers to do more than just comment and vote. They need to be able to interact with the posts and get them redefined and filtered. Now the idea of tagging isn’t new, but if you rely on the poster to tag their own article they can just tag it with something that they think will generate views instead of what it actually is.

The readers themselves have to be able to tag articles as they see appropriate and after a certain number of readers tag the same word the article becomes permanently tagged as such. This does one of two things, allows readers to filter posts, and prevents people from manipulating the system. This will work essentially by a people based spam filter. This has to be done because most people just visit the first few pages, and these worthless posts just push the good articles way back in the ranks.

For example, on January 1, 2008; an post titled “who got laid on new years?” was the number article on Reddit. This article is first, extremely worthless. There is no way to quantify a percentage since people are just able to vote it good or bad. All you know is that a lot of people are clicking on it. Not only is it not conveying any information, but it clutters the site. A post like that was just created in an attempt to ‘earn’ Reddit Karma… illegitimately.

Thiago Avila

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