Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

How Digg Gets Everything Backwards.. And How to Fix It

<< < (7/9) > >>

mouser:
all great points..
i think of particular relevance is this point:
Just remember that Average Joe seems pretty happy with Digg so really what you're trying to do is convince people that the "exciting, hip, new "unbiased", people-driven way of finding news" is wrong, and that's hard work.
--- End quote ---

i claim digg is totally fuxored and manipulated and susceptible to stupid fads, and does not do a good job at locating "good sites" as opposed to "good sounding titles".  and again by "good sites" i mean what i say above: "I define a "good" story as one which is considered good by those actually take the time to read the stories and have some interest in the subject area, as opposed to stories which simply sound appealing based on their title.  "

so i'm advocating a model for those who actually care about finding the good articles.  in other words, if you are looking for a car, do you want the car with the best name, spokesperson, and marketing campaign, or the car that looks+drives best and has best service?

if your answer is the latter, then i suggest digg is not what you want.

if i want a recommendation for what car to buy, i want to base it on reviews of people who know cars, not by holding up the marketing brochure and asking the votes of a room full of people who like to answer surveys but have never driven a care, combined with paid shills for the car companies .

mouser:
the main difference with slashdot is that slashdot is not transparent or accountable.  plus they have bad taste (imho).

i'm not really advocating a dramatic change - it's more that i am advocating for a sort of traditional middle level role for editors, but tweaking the methods for which ideas are submitted (ie a much more bottom-up accountable, trackable system by which story ideas percolate up), and methods by which editors are chosen and evaluated.

this is sort of where i think we are going with the idea of the new review section by the way..

JavaJones:
Yes, I was just going to say that. It seems like a very strong running theme for us is transparency, oppenness. I like it. In a way one could say we could take any existing site or service and potentially improve it by increasing transparency, and that can be a guiding principle. It is of course just a principle and it might not hold true in all cases, but I do like the idea of transparency, honesty, oppenness as a core driving value.

With that in mind it seems much less harmful to the concept to say "it's like Slashdot, only better", because now we define why it's better and the why is potentially compelling. Although I must mention that Slashdot having "bad taste" is really just pointing out one of the problems with all of this - who defines good taste? :D I suppose what you're trying to do is create a site that will find you stuff *you* would be interested in reading. And really I think most of the best ventures are started that way, by people who identify a problem they are familiar with and that probably affects them, and then attempting to solve it.

So I say bring on "The Transparent Slashdot". Given that Slashdot and similar sites already exist and their frameworks are often readily available for creating new sites, technology does not seem to be a current barrier. It becomes a matter of finding the right people. That may be quite a challenge in itself though.

Oh, but I do find myself wondering just what "accountability" means in this context and how a site like Slashdot could be "more accountable".

- Oshyan

mouser:
by transparent/accountable inthe framework is discuss above i am specifically referring to:
1) you could see all decisions made by expert representatives/editors (ie which submitted stories they rejected, voted for or against).
2) expert editors might be subject to election.

see above #11 (A Representative Elected Body of Expert Voters)

im not sure we want to go that far with out reviews, but that was the point i was trying to make in terms of differences with my proposed model vs. slashdot.

JavaJones:
Yes, the "transparency" doesn't need to be the same between different systems, but as a foundational principle I think it's a good one for many systems.

Do you think people would elect effective editors? Or would it just be the same dumb social game all over again? I suggest a meritocracy. :D

- Oshyan

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page