A very good point! 

I can't say much now, not before I have given it more thought...

I think dc may have one of the highest signal-to-noise ratio on the web. Some forum posts are long and ellaborate.

Hmm, maybe someone could do some research on what is behing that. Maybe forums as CMS are just better? Maybe it's the project management by mouser?

So you want to recreate Slashdot? Seriously, the only difference there is the "domain expert" focus - how you define these experts and how they are assigned/elected. On Slashdot it's purely a social thing, there appears to be no other merit involved, but there's nothing to say that a similar election by the general public wouldn't get you the George Bush of content editors. Oops, got a little political there, sorry.

Ok, so I like the idea of turning things on their head, but isn't this how a lot of sites already work? Isn't what people are excited about with Digg the fact that "the people" have more direct control? So even if you did successfully create such a site and the content were "better" (is this measurable?), would anyone really care?

I'm still curious whether a true example of this model already exists. I suspect it does, or darn close to it. Slashdot is actually pretty close, as I mentioned. Again the main differentiator is the definition of experts at the filter/editor level. If an even closer example can be found, I think the measure of its success might be instructive in this argument.

Then the question becomes: what is the goal of your site? Is it a place for a lot of smart people to enjoy quality stories, but not necessarily to attract "the masses"? If so I think that's a realistic goal. But you will inevitably be dealing with a minority and this includes your submitting body of general visitors. To really get the proper aggregate you'd need to attract more public interest, but can you do that without the Digg draw, the MySpace draw? The reason all of these sites are big - despite their glaring flaws (and I fully acknowledge them) - is people like to be told their important and given some level of power to show it (MySpace customization, for example). So what would be done with this proposed site to get people's interest and show its value over Digg to the average person? Once again this is much less of an issue if the average person is not the audience.

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. This is not a fundamentally wrong concept, it's just fighting against human nature IMO. I would love to be convinced otherwise!

- Oshyan

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..

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.

Note: all of these previous replies of mine were made without having actually read a lot of the stuff above because I was looking at an older version of the post/thread.

Anyway, interesting Mouser, the more I read about this stuff, the less I think agree with you. In fact I think the simplest fix for Digg is just to remove the reward for "Power Diggers". In this case, since there's no financial incentive (generally speaking), the reward is notoriety. So take away their fame, their profiles, etc. What matters (or should matter) there is not *who* Dugg something but *that it was Dugg* by enough people to get it to the front page. I grant that this doesn't address the problem of people being attracted to good headlines alone, or sensationalism, but I think a much more fundamental issue is the "elite" problem discussed a great deal in these articles. I think the Shmula.com "Digg as a game" article has some very good stuff to say on this which also happens to agree with me:

My Proposal

If Digg were to be relevant again, it must tackle the problems of GroupThink, Conformity, Paradigm Shift and Information Cascades.
To tackle Groupthink, make it truly democratic again — do not profile Top Diggers or elevate anybody higher than anyone else. This includes no special weights on previous digging history, etc. — level playing ground for everyone, no monarchies or philosopher-kings.
To tackle the problem of conformity, do not show profile or # of votes for up-and-coming dugg articles. Just show the article link, with no profiles or votes attached to it. As a compromise, only show the profiles and votes on the articles that make the digg front page, but make them un-diggable from the front page.

Doing the above 2 items will most likely fix the Paradigm Shift and Information Cascade problem.

That is coming from someone versed in game theory, and as he shows Digg can be very well visualized using game theory principles. So it stands to reason it could be fixed using similar analysis.

The idea of a representative voting system for the experts means that users can vote on (or rate) experts in much the same way they currently rate stories has a number of benefits.  Voting on experts based on their long term editing choices seems more rational and likely to lead to considered decisions as opposed to instantaneous mass voting based on a glimpse at headline titles.

This is interesting - who is to say people won't just positively rate bad reviewers? This just makes the choice of reviewers as big a problem as the choice and voting of stories, IMO. It shifts but does not solve the problem. The problem, at least beyond the "elite" issue discussed above, is that people are basically stupid and easily influenced. They like vapid entertainment and are headline driven. In fact isn't this almost how Digg works already, just more formalized? How else do people become "elite" except by implicit "votes" of support? How can you know the same flawed social dynamics will not govern the influence of your "elite editing body"?

You are trying to solve a fundamental problem of humanity with a rearrangement of the pieces, while still maintaining some semblance of democracy. I say if the people are the problem (and they are ) then forget about it, just make it a benevolent dictatorship: problem solved!

Meanwhile StumbleUpon doesn't really seem to be trying to do the same thing at all. It operates on the same fundamental principles, but - aside the "buzz.stumbleupon" page linked above, which is acknowledged to be "not the point" - it is focused more on suggesting things based on user history and predicted preference while browsing. It essentially takes the direct user element out of the equation in terms of choosing stories to look at. Obviously you can choose to look at something else if it suggests something you don't like, but without a "front page of headlines" it's really trying for something much different than any traditional media. Much more like viral marketing in that the majority of it happens person-to-person and behind the scenes rather than collected on some aggregator ("front page") like most news outlets. So while there may be lessons to be learned from SU (don't let users vote from front page, for example), the goals are different so a direct comparison isn't really useful IMO.

I must say I'm very interested in the influence on popularity of each of these sites' various approaches to these things. Is Digg popular because of these problems? I see it as a distinct possibility.

- Oshyan

A very interesting new article that focuses on what i have been saying for a long time is the key problem, that digg (like google) incentivizes bad behavior:
http://www.shmula.com/216/digg-a-lesson-in-freakonomics

the key to fixing these things has to be removing the incentive for gaming the system, because quotes like this from digg founders (and the similar stuff is said by google) is just wrong:

We have sophisticated anti-gaming processes. We are spending a lot in R & D to prevent gaming. Motivations don’t matter.

just like google's adsense has now become a playground for click fraud, and has created an entire shadow web of fake websites designed to get search engine traffic, until you fix the incentives, you are turning our internet into an engine for manipulation and gaming by those who make money by figuring out how to trick algorithms into bringing them traffic.

After reading the whole post, I still don't know what digg is... did I miss it or am I just naive?

Oh. I see. So the idea is to get the ones you want top rated by the small replies:
I agree.
Bump.
Yes.

And so on...