The failure of Digg-style general news sites

Though websites like Digg are incredibly successful for vertical topics like technology, it's increasingly clear that general news can't be treated quite so cavalierly. For that, simple collaboration sites are rife for abuse.

As I discussed in January, general news is a special breed of animal. Any collaboration sites for these topics will have to account for the political leaning of its authors and readers. That's because each news article and op-ed piece could be treated as if it has a certain "spin."

A general news site that doesn’t account for this will lose at least half of its audience as one side polarizes the other.

And there's ample evidence that this phenomenon has already occurred on Digg. In a recent front-page post ("Introduction to socially driven political news"), the author noted the following abuses:

Users are... allegedly organizing themselves in groups that support articles with specific agendas... many users consider [this a way] of gaming the system. At the time of writing this, 10 of the last 30 stories promoted to the front page of Digg from the Political News topic have been marked as possibly inaccurate by the community. 11 of the last 30 stories promoted from the Political Opinion topic have been marked likewise. What does this mean? If one were to take this at face value, one would think that either Digg is an exceptionally bad source of political stories, with more than 33% of them being inaccurate, or the burying feature on Digg is being grossly abused. Reading through the comments on these submissions reveals that it is the latter...

Commenter Helix400 notes:

...The author left out a major abuse of a small band of left wing diggers going through the upcoming stories and burying any right leaning submission out of the list altogether. In one thread, for example, 5 diggers actively worked together to mark a story as spam. Once it was off the upcoming stories (even though it was clearly headed for the main page), other posters continued to make comments in that thread because they previousy dugg the story. When anybody questioned why the story was buried, their comments were within a few minutes buried to -4. Hmm…pretty suspicious for a story already off the upcoming stories list. The user gronne was one of these people, and admitted to burying right leaning submissions as “Spam”. Here is one of these threads....

This fundamental flaw in the Digg-approach to general news is worth pointing out: some users -- on both sides of the political spectrum -- will abuse the collaboration tools in order to push their own side's agenda.

Some new sites like Spinr attempt to address the problem. So far, though, none of the sites has it mastered. The first collaborative news site that comes up with this magic formula will do extraordinarily well.