One of the problems with “social news” sites like Slashdot and Digg is that they only make a great place to get news if you are content to see only articles that re-enforce the biases of their current target audience. Any news outlet that allows users to have direct pseudo-democratic control of what is seen will fall prey to this.
Over time, that leads you to a sort of consensual world view hallucination among the viewers of a particular site. If they are given slightly to egotism and paranoia then something interesting happens… they start screaming about how the “main stream media” full of lies and propaganda whenever they have to step outside their delusion to deal with reality.
Hell, if you read Digg a lot you will see that they believe the following…
- We are only days away from the Impeachment of President Bush
- There are significant signs that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job” and / or never happened
- That Windows Vista is a bug ridden flop
- That any day now Microsoft is going to fail
- That any day now “the people” are going to rise up and demand the abolition of intellectual property law
- That Ron Paul is a strong candidate for the presidency
The list goes on and on.
The important lesson here is that almost all news outlets have an audience bias but the more direct participation the audience has on the editorial process the more narrow and discriminatory the bias becomes. Some things sites like these are good for but don;t confuse them with a representative information source.
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