Thing #12: Social Media Sites

I have used a social media sites a couple times before. I had not been too impressed with the content, so I hadn't bothered to go back. Nevertheless, I took another look.


Mixx: There are 4 main categories listed on the front page (more categories are available through the tabs): Popular Stories, News Stories, Entertainment Stories, and Tech Stories

They list the top 5 stories in each of these categories, with the number of votes. I was a little bit disturbed by the number of votes for these 5 stories in each category, as follows:

Popular Stories: 24-28 votes
News Stories: 16-22 votes
Entertainment Stories: 6-9 votes
Tech Stories: 10-12 votes


This feels like far too few votes to generate a reasonable list. If you had an axe to grind, or wanted to push an agenda, how hard would it be to push something onto one of those lists? Not too hard, it seems to me. The other categories they offer (Sports, Business, Health, etc.) had even fewer votes. If I was going to use a social media sites, I'd want something that was going to be a lot tougher to intentionally skew.

Digg: I've used Digg before - awhile back. It does feel like they get enough votes to make the evaluations "valid" -- hundreds of votes in most cases. Nevertheless, there are always things getting lots of votes that don't have any appeal to me. The day that I looked, one of the top vote getters was the "1964 Flintstones Cigarette Commercial". I think that says something about the kinds of things people are voting for - and it just isn't the kind of stuff I have time to be reading.
Digg is also sticky. It did that thing to me where I tried to click "back" to go back to the previous page I was at before Digg and all it did was reload Digg. Tried it several times - but it kept doing the same thing. I hate websites that do that. Is that on purpose? Anyway, as with other pages that do this nonsense, if you click "back" a couple times in rapid succession, you can go back faster than it can reload and keep you trapped there.

Newsvine: Newsvine is sort of interesting. The layout is appealing and the stories that were on there the day I looked seemed to "real" news stories. One I tried to read, you had to click on the story - which led you to a summary and comments page - and then click again to get to the real story. More of a nuisance than it should be. I want to read the story, I have no interest in the comments page. Frankly, I don't really get the comments pages. The Obama New Yorker cover story had 1,518 comments. Who reads 1,518 comments? I've seen Youtube videos that have over 20,000 comments. That's just too many. Personally, I rarely read more than 10-15,000 comments at a time.

Reddit: Reddit has all the visual appeal of craigslist. In case I'm being unclear, that is not a compliment. Beyond that, it's heavily skewed towards humor/silly/entertainment stories. If I want to read that kind of stuff, all I have to do is read the silly e-mail jokes, etc., that my friends, relatives and coworkers send me -- instead of just deleting them. If any of you are reading this, I'm not talking about you. Yours are interesting. It's everyone else's that are boring.