A year ago everyone (including me) was talking about how social news startups like Digg and Reddit were removing the need for news editors. Why should a human, with all his/her subjectivity and bias, decide what news is appropriate for us to consume on any given day, when the crowd can decide by simply voting?
But even as Digg continues to gain traffic and new users, some people just can’t be bothered sorting through all of the headlines, many of which appeal only to a niche audience. So things seem to be coming full circle as a new set of startups put a layer of human editors on top of the social news sites to pull out what they think is the most relevant stuff you’ll want to see.
Shoutingmat.ch, which describes itself as “a civilized retreat untainted by the excesses and whims of the mob” launched yesterday. The site, which has political, technology and “lifehack” news channels, sources stories from Digg, Reddit and other sites and presents it as a headline, with contributing discussion items from blogs and other news sources. Readers can also leave their own comments.
The end result of Shoutingmat.ch looks a lot like TechMeme, another non-edited news site (albeit one that uses an algorithm, not crowd sourcing, to decide what is news).
Ironically, the current top story in tech is the launch of the TechMeme leaderboard (a story that is now 36 hours old).
Shoutingmat.ch can be a good source of news, but all those human editors take a lot of time to sort through stuff. That means it’s no surprise that their top story is old news for TechMeme and Digg readers. And since those editors cost a lot more money to maintain than a bit of software sitting on a server somewhere, the company will need to generate a lot of page views to keep the lights on. We’ll check back in on them in a few months to see if they’ve perfected the model. Until then, I’m sticking with my prediction that, ultimately, the editor is a dying breed.
Update: In the comments it is becoming clear that, despite the About section description, the company is not using humans to source news items. That makes shoutingmat.ch a direct competitor to Techmeme and a bunch of other sites…and a slow one at that. The company says they will get stories faster over time.
Michael-
The stories aren’t posted by human editors. Shoutingmat.ch has an indexing engine that scours A-list blogs and uses a social rank algorithm to generate and order links from the content referenced on top blogs. Except for the excerpts, it’s a fully-automated process
That isn’t what the about section says, unless they use the term “ninja” to mean humans in the first part, software later:
“The ninja editors at shoutingmat.ch have compiled a definitive list of the blogs that everyone’s reading. A separate elite division of parsing ninjas scours these blogs regularly to find out what all the blogging heads are linking to. Using our top-secret army of (robot—and, again, ninja) monkeys, we then determine what links are hot and publish them for you.”
If humans are not being used to select the news, then the about section is misleading. And, this is just a poor version of TechMeme.
Yeah, but you gotta love the name.
@Eric - yeah because the .ch is so clever and 2.0 ish!
I suppose the about page could have been clearer (and less witty).
We’ve manually compiled a list of the blogs. The “elite division of parsing ninjas” is really an indexing algorithm (which I wrote).
As more sites are added to the corpus of A-list blogs, you’ll see the lag-time decrease. The political channel already has a larger corpus, and you should be able to see that those links already appear much faster.
That’s why we called them “robot” ninja monkeys.
PJ - ok, so you are the founder or associated with the site somehow… And you are stating that humans are not used to determine actual new items?
What turned me off of digg well over a year ago was the fact that there was no editor. The stories are for the most part very poorly written/summarized, with things like “Title says it all” and “SO FUNNY ROFL!!!” … the link itself may be interesting/relevant/etc but there really needs to be some sort of human intervention for the stories that make the front page. Otherwise it just feels like I’m surrounded by 13 year old boys.
That’s one thing I liked about netscape/propeller, although I never used that site much, I thought the editors on top of the voting system was a good idea and seemed to work relatively well.
Yes, I’m the founder.
First off, thanks for the link. We definitely appreciate it.
Humans are not used to determine actual new items. They are used to grab the excerpts that appear under the headlines, but a story will go up without an excerpt if one is not created immediately.
PJ - ok thanks for the clarification. I’ve updated the post, although the whole point of it (see title) is sort of irrelevant now. You’ve got some work to do to compete with techmeme.
this comment from doland confirms the author’s point of view: editors are losing it. i’d say people don’t like to read the most popular news, they like to read the news from the popular guys.
One of the things that sets us apart from Techmeme is that we really built this as a channel-based platform to cover a wide variety of subjects, instead of just tech news. Right now we have political, tech, and lifehack channels live, but we will be launching an entertainment channel covering movies, music, and television next week. Sports will follow in late October.
yes, that is why I only use MSN!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I started using nozzl the other day ( http://www.newznozzl.com ), which is something like this - it sucks only the top stories off of a-list social news sites (digg, reddit, etc) and the lets people vote on those (starting at 0). I think the idea is by the time it hits the nozzl front page, it’s only the best of the best. Only problem with that right now is there’s a limited set of users, so that top filter isn’t really coming into play.
I hope sites like nozzl and Shoutingmat.ch figure this out, as I’ve gotten tired of the quality of the other sites.
=K=
Webmasters use DIGG as the way to promote their websites and increase website ratings. For this reason, I think that DIGG is destined to become a dumpster of links and articles unless it starts editing and moderating what is submitted. Otherwise, soon many people will be submitting every page on their website to DIGG just to increase the traffic. I wrote about it in my blog (http://exchange3d.blogspot.com/) yesterday how I could use DIGG to promote my small-business online store (http://www.exchange3d.com).
Regarding the title of the article, I remember not long ago someone created a site @ coRank that was being fed all posts that made the front page of Digg (and only those articles that made Digg’s front page), and through votes on those articles, create a new front page with only the articles that would get enough votes and such.
I found it to be a not-too-bad idea: crowd-sourcing on top of crowd sourcing. Or something like that.
The site didn’t fly though, because among other things the guy who created it didn’t focus on building community around it, so the slot is empty now in case someone cares
Fake SB: stop spamming. You’re booooooring…
RBA, was it Nozzl? I have no idea how long it’s been around, but it’s not very active if it’s been a while. If not, do you remember what it was? Sounds a bit different, as Nozzl takes from more than Digg.
=K=
PJ - in each of your 3 categories - can you post a list of which blogs you are indexing?
Hopefully they can do something about all the Ron Paul spam that is going on on Digg.
I used to be an active user on Digg, but as it got more popular it became too biased and every day the headlines were full of the same stories, news and “top X firefox extensions” lists. Not to mention anyone who disagreed with the masses got “dugg” down immediately. I prefer the quality posts of the human edited Slashdot any day, but they’re often a bit too techy for my interests.
In my feed aggregator, I have a tab for Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and the rest. I call it “Buzz”. And I have another tab for NYTimes.com, Economist.com, LeMonde.fr etc. I call that “News”. Coz there’s a difference.
Truth be told, Digg should really be renamed as “Digg who you know” rather than “Digg what you know”. It appears there are a select handful of diggers that can get their stories popular but for others, it’s SOL. In essence, these popular diggers are the pseudo-editors IMO.
The problem with crowdsourcing is that all of these projects tend towards a natural organic sort of cabalism. The fact is that there will always be a minority of people with lots of time on their hands to devote to the project (many of them are high schoolers and college students) and as a result, have undue influence in the crowd. Eventually, in a project with some form of interpersonal communication, they start to recognize each other and work together, speaking the ingrained, naturally developed project-specific language of the heavily involved.
It doesn’t matter what project — Digg, Wikipedia, ODP, E2, you name it — whoever has the most time on their hands to devote to the project get the most power to steer it, and form an inner circle, without even really trying.
K, I couldn’t agree more, so the scary thought is that popular sites like Digg, reddit, etc are controlled by high schoolers and college students, hmm.
If you’re looking for a true professionally edited content discovery service we’ve got what you’re looking for at auditoriumA.com. There is just so much content on the web someone needed to start the web’s first “channel” to make browsing through the best of it all an effortless process.
While 8-10% of web users like to submit content, links, and stories there is a much larger percentage of people who just want to spend time watch, reading, and listening to great stuff. They don’t really care how it gets there they just know quality when they see it.
Sorry, Michael - professional editors are here to stay. Check us out and let us know what you think.
http://www.auditoriumA.com
Where discerning web users find real quality, real fast.
I don’t care if news is not appealing to me….ignorance is bliss
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
No need to throw the editorial baby out with the social media bathwater: there’s a place for straight-up algorithm, a place for unfettered user-generation, and a place for traditional top-down editorial.
This is especially true when you go beyond news, where busy people need more than aggregation — they need abbreviation. And that’s where our 100-word Brijit Abstracts come in.
We’re taking a hybrid approach at Brijit (check it out at http://www.brijit.com), mostly because a meaningful, qualitative summary/rating/review remains a job that individuals do better than crowds or algorithms. Our EDITORS define a coverage universe, then anyone in the CROWD with the time and inclination can claim an assignment and submit an abstract. Our editors then choose from among the submissions, spiff up the best one, and up it goes on the site. And then the ALGORITHM kicks in to generate our most popular list.
Editors. Crowds. Algorithms. Love ‘em all.
Best,
Brijit
Maybe we should now call Techcrunch comments section “Shameless Self-Promotion for Web 2.0 startups” section.
can you people for once post without promoting your damn websites?
Personally I’ve found adding the feeds for digg, reddit, etc into http://aiderss.com and let it filter out the trash for me. Put the output of that feed into my feed reader along with the sites I want to read all the content on, and my time scanning articles in the morning is probably halved.
This isn’t a new idea: http://www.newsmash.net has been around for a couple years now (with a slightly different approach).
There are examples where editors already do that …. especially in ‘vertical industry’ Digg-like sites which aim to post news about particular sectors.
There are far too many “techie” news sites around. Try promoting the arts, literature - anything that Digg does not directly represent - there’s enough tech stuff on the web.
People who work on the web talking about people who work on the web just isn’t that interesting. Try making something that connects ordinary human beings with the things they are interested in. That will see a marked increase in pageviews.
In my opinion
Interesting idea and well executed - kudos to the Shoutingmatch team. Niche/vertical aggregation has a lot of potential, but let’s not forget that we can also filter sources based on other/individual metrics just as well. Take digg, for example: http://www.aiderss.com/great/digg.com
What they (and Digg, etc.) are trying to do has already been modeled, and quite successfully at that. Slashdot figured out how to balance community and editorial ten years ago (a decade this month, in fact).
Obviously, given the site that I work in, I’m strongly in favor of a editorial role. The general issue that I’ve seen with pure user-based voting is that while direct democracy can work well within smaller, homogenous communities, the wheels start to fall off of it as it grows larger. This, for example, is why the United States is run as a republic, not as a direct democracy. The core issue is that as a community fragments, they cannot come to agreement on promotion of smaller more specialized stories that are very important, but don’t have as much broad appeal — so what ends up getting the votes necessary for the front page on most sites is either Lowest Common Denominater content or more inflammatory material.
Are humans faster or slower than computers? Only time will tell
Michael A.,
Check out Scott Karp’s “Publishing 2″ startup; “standing on the shoulders of Digg”, it’s a platform for journalists [check his definition] to create and distribute news. It’s pretty brilliant:
http://blog.publish2.com/2007/.....rked-news/
I don’t like human editors [ maybe for front page] but i have had several friends who I turned on to netscape/propeller and they were banned within a day. Why not becuase of ads cuase they had none. Not becuase of copy right laws, becuase it was all original… I personally think it was bias and compatition attacks.
I had one friend who to prove it was other or anchors who were against him created four accounts and all were articles posted that only had text - and one after another was blocked and banned????
Humans are falable…
Human editors may be the only way to save the site. I don’t even bother going to Digg anymore because of the rampant paid diggs. I know several places where you can buy diggs. That makes the site about as relevant to me as the sunday circulars.
This is a Del.icio.us type site for the education profession… http://www.edtags.org
I haven’t dugg a story since July. The site is just too full of day-old CNN stories, conspiracy theories, and photos. Any submitted article is likely to be completely misinterpreted or oversimplified in the summary, and diggers clearly often comment on stories without reading them. Digg isn’t a news aggregator as much as it’s just a simple social bookmarking tool. There is no incentive for Kevin Rose and team to make any changes. Making any changes are likely to decrease their userbase, not increase it, and web 2.0, in the end, is about your userbase, and eventually monetizing it or selling it.
CmdrTaco… Is that you? Hey buddy, long time now talk
Digg’s ‘bury brigade’ have held the site back. So too have the spammers.
The comments are the best argument for human editors I’ve seen in a long time. Gosh, could people with deep subject matter expertise who can provide context for news stories provide some value? Who’d have thought it?
There is a difference between driving for relevancy for the consumer market - like the approaches discussed here - and getting to relevancy for the professional user. In the Wall St community, direct relevancy to the investor’s topics of interest is critical to have any readership. Portfolio managers and analysts have no time, and time is money, so they will pay for a service that truly finds and filters investable information from the web. But even with the state of the art in algorithms it takes human editors to solve the last mile of relevancy for the user.