Blagnet.net

Democratic vs. oligarchic news sites

Recently Jeffrey Tucker wrote about the reasons he doesn’t like Digg.com as much as he used to:

There was a time, I vaguely recall, when Digg was a must read. Nearly every item unearthed some smart, interesting bit of inside knowledge, tech news before it became mainstream, fascinating observations that you would otherwise miss. Back then, the algorithms determining what got on the front page were susceptible to what people later called “gaming,” which meant that groups of people with special interest would work together to drive things to the front page.

I haven’t followed this very closely, but I gather than sometime within the last year, there was an effort to democratize the process, and the algorithms were changed. Now diggs from similar IPs that mutually dugg some previous item are discounted as a possible sign of gaming. What this new system did was disempower the micro-oligarchies that had previous arisen to promote obscure stories that should be of general interest.

Now, the stories that hit the front page are truly more “democratic,” and read like it. Specialization and sector-specific knowledge is discounted. You hardly ever discover things for which you are grateful. It is more like the mainstream news, like an electronic version of stuff you see at the checkout counter at the grocery store. Right now, for example, I see items like “The 15 nuttiest celebrity stalkers” and “15 Futuristic Green Housing Innovations.” Yuk. The promoted stories are those that are dugg by the most diverse groups of people, which is to say that we end up being alerted to what people already know.

Another user-submission-driven “news” site is Fark.com. I have written about why I abandoned Fark.com about a year and a half ago: the idiocy, hatred, and ridiculous bias (basically: Statolatry) exhibited by its users in the discussion threads drove me to anger and sadness far too often. Farkers are, by and large, hateful and intolerant people.

When I’m really bored at work or want to put off going to bed for another ten or fifteen minutes, I might visit Fark. I have done it probably five or six times this year. One of those came last night. I eventually came across this discussion thread started by Drew Curtis himself, the proprietor of Fark.com (who, as far as I can tell, is a fantastic and down-to-earth guy). His post was about the way they moderate the forums—mainly, how they determine what level of trolling or douchebaggery has gone too far and deserves temporary or permanent bannination.

In discussing the nature of the Fark community and how it differs from other news/politics/discussion communities, Drew wrote this:

A lot of other communities, mainly news aggregators, try to adopt the democratic model of posting stories and links. This works great until you factor spammers into the equation, then everything goes to hell. You also run into issues with something I like to call “tyranny by well-organized minorities”. Note how Ron Paul supporters were able to effectively dominate social news websites during the primary election season.

Well, putting aside the differences in semantics—Jeffrey Tucker differentiates between “micro-oligarchical” link submission and “democratic” link submission, whereas Drew seems to say “democratic” link submission and “tyranny by well-organized minorities” are in the same category—there is an interesting point in there.

First, for those who don’t know much about Fark.com: Fark has always been driven by users’ link submissions, which are either “green-lighted” or “red-lighted” by Drew and other moderators; they decide what is worthy of their website and what isn’t. If they don’t think it’s all that interesting, or funny, or unique, or capable of generating some kind of good discussion, or if someone already submitted the same story with a different URL, it gets dumped. Or, if it’s mid-day in the U.S. and the moderators have a lot to do, they’ll just purge the entire list of un-moderated links and start green-lighting and red-lighting them when submissions die down. The number of times a URL is submitted has nothing to do with where it is on the page or whether it gets seen by Farkers; green-lighted links appear in reverse-chronological order and can only be submitted once, ever; any time a user attempts to submit a URL for a second (or third, or millionth) time, it doesn’t get submitted because it was already either green-lighted or rejected. So volume of (attempted) submissions is irrelevant.

So Fark’s status as a both-user-and-moderator-driven site basically makes the whole democratic link-submission vs. well-organized-minority link-submission thing irrelevant for Fark. Still, I detect no small amount of disapproval of the democratic and oligarchic link-submission algorithms of other sites in Drew’s post. He thinks well-organized minorities detract from the quality a website by propping up their pet stories or their pet issues to the top of the page.

It’s too bad I saw Drew’s post a day and a half after it was posted; if I had seen it shortly after it was posted, I would have commented that a “democratic” and an “oligarchic” link-posting algorithm are actually pretty different (though still unlike anything Fark.com has ever done), and the former is of almost no value to anybody. I would have echoed Jeffrey Tucker’s comments, which happened to be posted on the same day as Drew’s post and which I had already read. If you want a news source that doesn’t have artificially-propped-up stories about Ron Paul and Ralph Nader, you can try any of the following venues:
abcnews.com
cbsnews.com
msnbc.com
cnn.com
cnbc.com
news.yahoo.com
news.bbc.co.uk
msn.com
aol.com
foxnews.com
news.google.com
ABC World News
CBS Evening News
CNN
Fox News Channel
MSNBC
CNBC
CNN Headline News
Newsweek
Time
U.S. News & World Report
Forbes Magazine
Financial Times
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Los Angeles Times
Chicago Sun-Times
local newscasts and every other newspaper on the planet

There is a reason every major media outlet ignores people like Ron Paul and Ralph Nader: they’re giving their customers what they want. But there’s a good reason the customers don’t want stories about Ron Paul and Ralph Nader: the media don’t cover them very much, at least not compared to more mainstream candidates. (Though, as Gene Callahan pointed out in a blag post I cannot find, there were a pretty fair number MSM articles and stories about Ron Paul during the primary season. Okay. But not nearly as many as the more palatable candidates, which is, again, understandable but still biased.)

My point: if you want a news site that is indistinguishable from all the rest and tells everyone what they already know (or gives them useless claptrap), “democratic” link-submission is the fastest route there. “Tyranny by well-organized minorities” at least separates your site from the crowd. Oh, wait, that’s the same thing Jeffrey Tucker wrote. Well, I put mine in the context of Drew Curtis’s blag post…

Posted in Computers/technology, Media, Ron Paul