Are New “News” Sites Really Conformity Engines?

Posted on August 21, 2006
Filed Under Review, Error and bias |

When Netscape appeared, or re-appeared, but became an online user-generated news-site, the question blogged interminably at first was: is this just a copy of Digg?

There are many questions left to ask about Netscape’s UCG news-site but any doubt about it being a replica should be now closed off - it ain’t. And the dangers of these types of site is not do they copy each other but whether they create an engine that ensures confrmity.

What do they mean for how we form opinions, build consensus, or reflect viewpoints? On Netscape itself is a post by a netscape editor who believes readers are banding together to push a different news agenda. I disagree.

I’ve been using Netscape for a couple of weeks now. Remember this was one of the most important media companies every to exist and go into obscurity.

I’ve posted on health, politics, travel and food and technology.

It probably directs about 100 visitors a day to my blog/site. I’m happy with that as a return for spending a few minutes uploading. Digg refers next to nothing for my kind of stuff.

However I think Netscape suffers, or is compromised, in a number of ways - and I say this as somebody who knows how much any media life, role, company, existence is compromised.

Like Digg, Netscape relies on its users creating material that creates a swarm. High voted stories draw the attention of readers so people, we can assume, write or refer stories and compose headlines to draw attention.

By and large in fact the stories are referring to conventional news sources (CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, YAHOO, ABC, and daily newspapers), so the front page almost literally replicates the day’s news agenda

The structure and mechanisms of the site tempt you to write about political issues because they are Netscape’s front page.

Netscape employs human editors who select stories for special prominence on the header area of a category. When one of mine was selected (my first submission) it drove traffic but picked up very few votes. It wasn’t even a good story - just a muse on melons. I didn’t rate it.

The stories I’ve posted that I really rated haven’t been picked up by editors and nor have they secured votes. They are important health stories - progress in understanding the effects of having your teeth filled with mercury, transitioning to a salt free cooking life, the political lobby behind olive oil.

In my view these are good stories - the selected piece was not one. It got the most votes and it got picked as an editor choice.

The temptation when you’re faced with what appears to be an irrational process is to manipulate it - get friends to join and vote your stories, select stories that are in the direct line of the vote swarm, refocus your energies on the things that Netscape readers seem to vote on.

It’s an issue I think that dogs any Web 2.0 news services, or info sevice. What we wanted was diversity but we’re in danger of creating more conformity.

Getting round that is a political decision for Netscape-like service providers to address otherwise their role is easily replicable by other services and it becomes a simply relay service, flagging up what the various news services are reporting and drawing a part of the swarm to them. That’s about as innovative as the old street corner newspaper sales kiosk.

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