The Wisdom of Crowds or Mob Rule?
I like the question being posed in this very recent article in BlogCritics. Certainly a very good question. One of the good points raised there are that the crowd is smart only when they are allowed to make independent decisions without being affected largely by the decision of others.
“There are problems with the current wave of user-driven sites, like Reddit, Digg, and Netscape”.
In my opinion, the next generation of social news sites should really harness the collective wisdom of the crowd by minimising the social networking aspects and instead concentrate on the relevance of news content. Newscribe certainly attempts to address this issue by providing only premium content which ensures the quality range of articles remain high at all times, but still remain entirely user driven. There is very little room to game the system, like what we can see with the current popular social news site.
I believe that instead of a user-generated & user-driven site, a pure user-driven site will be able to provide more relevant content in the long term. Mob rule is not entirely a dangerous thing if the contents are of good quality.
