Software developer and deep thinker Dave Winer has posted a thoughtful look forward into the crystal ball of social news aggregation on his blog, Scripting News. Whether or not his idea is one of merit, I'll leave to you. Though if you've spent the last few years watching Digg, Netscape and Reddit change as they've grown, chances are you'll see some potential here.
His argument goes like this. The signal-to-noise ratio on Digg.com (and other social news gathering sites) was remarkably low with only a few thousand users. "It was good," Winer writes. "The articles were gems, things we weren't finding on our own, there were huge numbers of them, but they were prioritized, and the community had a heart of gold, people were doing it for love. The maturity level was high."
But as these sites grow beyond that initial pool of users, Winer contends, things get ugly. A certain threshold is reached – somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 users – and submissions to the site become less focused. The editorial vision is muddied as too many cooks spoil the special sauce that made the community special. The site begins driving so much residual traffic, gaming and spam and link-baiting creep in.
So Winer wants to go back to basics – start a simple news aggregation site with a core group of 25 or so users, people who share common ideas about what kind of editorial direction they should be collectively promoting. And they'll stick to it, building a social news community with a stronger focus.
He lists a few of his friends he'd invite to help cull links to news stories, keeping it small like a Facebook group or a niche social network. But the outward-facing part, the actual news pulled together by this blogger aristocracy (my term) would be readable by everyone.
In a way, this is what sites like Buzzfeed are doing. A small group of contributors pulls together groups of links to the hottest memes of the hour/day/week. We all get to participate by enjoying their finds and reading the links, but we can also keep memes hot longer by clicking on them.
Perhaps the most promising part of Winer's post is this bit at the end, which takes this idea some might find overly exclusionary and turns it on its head:
