Can Anonymous voting redefine social media?

[Paul Keith]

Mattters offers easy, single-click access to high quality, real-time, news and stories about the thousands of topics that the major news organizations ignore, but which really, really matter to the rest of us.

Each website and tweep is hand-picked by our staff after laboriously researching, examining, poking, probing and dissecting it/them. Those that are consistantly the most interesting, the most relevant, that have the nicest photos and in-depth news or interesting speculations are preferred.

We don't care if a website is a major website or just has a few dozen visitors each month - if they have great content, we love them!

Its all about helping everyone 'follow their interests'. We hope to make this so easy and fun that we can follow interests we never knew (or had forgotten) we had!

Sorry if this is pretty common. This is the first time I've encountered a social media service that supports anonymous voting (although according to the site, the voting has less impact if you don't sign up)

The lay-out pretty much hurts my eyes so no pictures but surprisingly the anonymity of it all made me more inclined to vote on a story. Not sure if this interest would hold up but it did made me participate in stories despite the painful lay-out.

Matters.com

[daddydave]

I think web polls are generally anonymous anyway, or at least anonymous enough to let us pretend we are anonymous on the internet.

But for me, the layout draws me in, it looks a little like Feedly. Even though it's densely packed, the more article teasers it sticks in your face, the more likely one is to catch the eye.

[daddydave]

Now when you say social media, do you mean it's trying to be a digg thing? If so, the layout is all wrong, but I have to think about it some more. Hmmm.

[Deozaan]

Mattters offers easy, single-click access to high quality, real-time, news and stories about the thousands of topics that the major news organizations ignore, but which really, really matter to the rest of us.

(Emphasis added)

If the stuff on the front page of that site is what really matters in life, I must be really screwed up because nearly everything I saw there looked like a complete waste of time to me.

EDIT: Added the quote above to specify what my reply was directed to.

[daddydave]

I admit I didn't really read the quote.

Each website and tweep is hand-picked by our staff after laboriously researching, examining, poking, probing and dissecting it/them. Those that are consistantly the most interesting, the most relevant, that have the nicest photos and in-depth news or interesting speculations are preferred.

Rather ironic, since the articles that appear to be a random selection of internet crap that is somehow further refined by the voting.

I agree the content is not the best, but I was commenting on the presentation. I thought it was more or less trying to compete with Technorati (although I prefer the cleaner look of  that site). But it's scary to think these are the stories that were hand picked.

[Paul Keith]

The specific categories are much better than the frontpage but really this is basically what you get when you have a low traffic social media site combined with an image-centric lay-out combined with an editing crew that regularly doesn't update new content fast enough.

99% of what makes social media seem less like a turd magnet is the amount of times the users of the service polish the front page and even then it seems less smelly only because majority of the time a cleaner interface makes it easy to skip the trail of brown compared to seeing it all in full view.

[40hz]

If the stuff on the front page of that site is what really matters in life, I must be really screwed up because nearly everything I saw there looked like a complete waste of time to me.

+1.

Took a look at the site.

The fact there are still some people who believe there's this info-alchemical force that can transmute shallow comments on trivial topics into something of value (as long as you can gather enough of them in one place) will never cease to amaze me.

Stockpiling fertilizer won't get you a corn crop.

About all it will do is increase the risk of an explosion.

[attach]