One of the major trends today for gathering news are these social news sites. The idea is great, you give a bunch of a great tool, like digg and let them produce what they think is good news. The issue is you are giving away editorial control, therefore you will get a lot of junk.
When digg first started the news on the site was great, it was mainly tech people who knew about it and therefore they were all like minded. The stories that made it to the top where truly great stories that should be read. Over time the site has fallen victim of its own success, as more people have found the site the sheer number of bad topics has risen dramatically.
Another great idea about these sites is the commenting systems. You should be able to have a good conversation about the topic using this system. The issue is that there are too many people who are fanboys. For example, if someone posts a link to a Microsoft announcement one of the first comments will either be about Ubuntu or Apple. The system on digg does have the ability to “digg down” a comment to hide it, but this is something that is severely broken as well. There are just too many people for this system to truly work well.
These social news sites have two extremes; too popular that the system does not work or there are not enough users for the site to function. There seems to be very little middle ground. When a site works great people flock to it, therefore causing bloat. To see this bloat just look at the most dugg story of all time on digg, it is about HD-DVD cracking. The actual number that was posted does not matter here, it is the fact that they finally allowed the number on the site after blocking it for around 24 hours. In those 24 hours that the number was blocked there were several hundred, if not thousand, stories regarding this little hexadecimal number.
This is just one example where users only focus on one story and everything else falls off the radar. This is the point, when users control the content you will get a lot of junk. The original purpose of these types of sites was to get rid of this junk.
In my opinion social news sites will never work properly. There are just too many people with too much time on their hands to screw it up.
