As a concept, Veritocracy is actually quite simple. At its heart, social news site pulls together some of the better qualities of Techmeme — targeted stories and related posts to an original story — and Digg. Once you get to the front page, you’re immediately presented with a nice layout of highly-targeted stories on topics ranging from politics and technology to business and entertainment.
The site collects what it deems to be the best perspectives on various subjects from around the Web, groups them together by topic, and lets its users decide which is best through the use of a voting system. As a user votes on different stories, Veritocracy becomes more personalized to that specific user’s tastes. And as long as that engine works well, Veritocracy claims publishers will be able to find the ideal target audience and readers will find stories that fit their interests.”The ultimate objective,” says CEO Lee Hoffman, “is to create a truly meritocratic content distribution system where each article a writer publishes finds its way to the individual readers that will actually want to see it.”
Before that can happen, Veritocracy has a long way to go. Right now, the site is in private beta and is slowly working its way towards a wider release later this year. If you want to check out Veritocracy for yourself, Veritocracy sent us 500 invites for TechCrunch readers. To redeem your invite, type “techcrunchlove” into the invite box, sign up, and start using it.
After trying it for a while, it quickly becomes apparent that if users find reasons to use this site and the company can deliver on its lofty promises, Veritocracy could become a destination for news junkies.
In each category, you’re presented with a story — “Palin takes the stage on night two at the convention” for example — that can be clicked on. Once you click that link, you’ll drill-down into perspectives on the Vice Presidential nominee’s speech last night at the Republican National Convention. Some say it was great, others are more suspect of its success. From there, you can click on the links to be brought to the respective article or you can vote them up or down based on your own opinion on the subject.
As votes start accumulating, Veritocracy promotes the better stories to the top. At the same time, each of your votes is recorded and remembered to help create a more enjoyable experience the next time you come back to the site. In other words, if you continually vote stories by conservative pundits down in the politics section and you tend to enjoy stories that are more “cranky” in the technology section, Veritocracy will tailor your experience based on those votes.
As CEO Hoffman points out, “Veritocracy isn’t a popularity contest, so voting up all of your friends’ content will only cause you to see more of their stuff, and the stuff they like.”
That in mind, the success of Veritocracy depends on the honesty of its users. The name “Veritocracy” is derived from the concept of meritocracy: those stories that deserve to be best will be. If users vote for those perspectives that deserve to be promoted, the site should run as designed: the best stories on each topic will rise to the top, and the greatest number of users will have a personalized experience. How will Veritocracy fight people trying to game the rankings? Hoffman explains:
We do this by learning how effective each user on the site is as an editor for you by comparing your vote histories. Unlike other personalization/recommendation systems (think Amazon, and Digg’s new recommendations) our system significantly ramps up the accuracy of these predictions by using a market based design layered over the standard personalization algorithms.
If you submit crap, miscategorize your articles, or even vote for other people’s crap, readers won’t be voting for the same things you are (and may even vote down things you vote up) and thus the the system will uncorrelate you from everyone (or won’t correlate you to them in the first place). This will make sure your content and votes have less chance of effecting what other users see in the future. Of course, a lot of the time “crap” and “quality” are entirely relative, and that’s where the system really shines because it learns to distinguish this for each user, based on the same design principal.
Veritocracy also lets the original authors of stories submit them on different topics. (Veriticracy funnels all stories into consistent topics instead of tags). After a specific topic is identified, users can upload their own stories, which will then be placed as a perspective on the given topic. Once there, other users can vote it up or down based on its quality and relevance to the topic.
But because so much of Veritocracy’s success relies on its community, it’s tough to say how well it will perform—for now, few even have access to it. But the site has promise. It just needs more participation.
No dice if you are running Chrome, only IE7, FF & Safari.
I opened firefox to sign up but it was irritating not to be able to use Chrome…
Its normal here in firefox, i signed up and tried to activate my blog’s feed but its not activating. Confused where to add to activate code in the posts.
something just doesn’t feel right with this site. When i was reading the artcile i was like “hmm nice idea, can’t wait to try it” but upon registering and using the site a bit i lost all the interest.
i’m not sure if it’s the terrible design, or extra ajax stuff or lack of enough substance (content) or maybe even something more serious than that, i just couldn’t find the satisfaction… too bad, i won’t be returning, this could have been good, i would dare and say, Yet another fail!
have to say I agree with bam. And, I like Ajaxy shiz. and I love their logo. But it wasn’t a must-use on first visit.
Bam,
Nail on the head. I expected content to be lacking at this stage. What I also expected though was easier navigation and customization. Too bad.
Scott
Well I saw the word “social” in the first sentence, so it’s sure to succeed.
Ha ha socially everything is going good these days..
Btw used the code and joined.
Thanks!
Yeah, no go for Chrome users… you need ‘one of the modern web browsers’!
i forgot to add…
if the site admins are reading this site… when people receive the activation codes in the email, the out going link has a typo that gives us 404 error.
http://wwwveri.com/?activate_code=AWDASDAS... <<< is missing a dot after “www”
There’s a serious lack of RSS support, which is the only way I’d use a site like this, unfortunately.
It looks quite interesting. Maybe not a revolution but needs to be tested.
An invite for a french tech blogger ?
Thanks !
Ahhh ! Sorry I apparently didn’t read the full text :s
Hmmm, there is serious potential here. I went through two topics and I got all sides of the issue presented together without various agenda’s shining through like on digg. I like that bloggers and main stream media are treated the same. If the personalization works, I’m sold.
I’d be interested to see the number of votes each story has; right now when you vote up or down, you get no feedback on where the article’s standing, which seems somewhat limiting.
@hornswaggled Are you considering that a fault of veritocracy or Google?
Nice… DIGG is legit, but this program seems much improved….
While the site is not the most intuitive site I’ve ever seen, if this idea works as advertised I’m in too. Seems to me that this might be a little chicken or the egg right now without having a sizeable chunk of users — the site will be awesome and take off when there’s more content and there will be more content when the site takes off… I’m going to keep an eye on this one. And it looks like for bloggers etc. it’s pretty braindead simple to get content into the site and organized.
I was so siked when i visited the site because FINALLY, someone hit the mark. For now, i will certainly use this site to easily get differing opinions on all sides of an issue (especially now for political news - does great on topics for the Palin pick and controversy). When the site gets more users in the future (and hopefully learns exactly what I want to see), this will replace my RSS because it will cut through the bullshit and just give me what I want. Not to mention - I really like that you can submit your own articles. For someone who has a lot to say, but no one to listen, this is potentially a great way to have that voice heard (that is, if it’s a good voice). FANTASTIC!
Hopefully this improves as the user base grows (crowd power)…but I agree with a previous comment that something just doesn’t feel right …. it doesn’t fell very user-friendly…I would suggest to conduct an independent Usability test in the near future because while techies can always figure out how to work on these new websites, the general public doesn’t have the patience to have to figure things out.
And get rid of the CAPTCHAs…they’re so annoying and create another obstacle.
for god’s sake…. I cannot believe people are actually bitching that a STARTUP is not yet configured to work properly in a BROWSER THAT LAUNCHED A FEW DAYS AGO!
Some of you people are nuts. Start-ups have a lot on their plate. They’re lucky if they have FF, IE6 and7 on both PC and Macs, and Opera/Safari working when they launch/go in beta.
How can I get an invite?
Err, nevermind, I found it
(i read the article)
You just don’t deserve to have an invite. You don’t read the article, just see you got invited for a beta. LOL
I find techmeme useful because it has a mobile (mini) version which I can use while sitting on a train or waiting (in line, for my meal, for a bus) and catch up on all the headlines. Wish they also provided a version which only indexes mobile content (or provides url to mobile content) so I can get to full articles from my phone.
Why would they come up with the mouthful brand “Veritocracy” if they’ve got the Veri.com domain name?
Tried to use Safari Version 4 Developer Preview (5526.11.2), but no dice. Got the “use a modern browser” screen. Signed up using Firefox, contacted them to tell them about the bug, then quit Firefox. I’ll wait till they fix it to sign back in and start using it.
The idea itself is good, but the execution is really bad.
*yawn*
Interesting idea, but unusable on the iphone, where many people like to social surf.
Works fine on mine, try try again.
I hope this means as an early-ish adopter that I might actually have a chance at getting some of my stories popular.
But srsly, this seems like an upgraded version of what digg used to be.
Nice post, interesting website tho. Might write about it , once they provide me some invites too.
Thanks. Don…
MORE. OF. THE. SAME. I want to hear about disruptions in the market!
Ah… The invite code doesn’t work anymore
Sounds good . There is a great new start-up that just came out . It is all self serve and it is also fully automated . It supports all types text ads, banners and video ads.For publishers , it offers the highest split of earnings you can find out there and much more. It caters to web and mobile Publishers and Advertisers . Web and Mobile Publishers can earn money easier than ever and registering is FREE. Please check it out : http://www.webmob-ad.com
the code is not working
I tried visiting Veritocracy’s website using Google’s Chrome and was greeted with the following message, “Veritocracy Beta currently requires one of the above modern web browsers.”
This sounds a lot like Quotd (quotd.com) — ask questions and then quote people. Interesting space that’s developing here. Not sure if these would be better as user-generated sites (everyone gets to opine) or news/opinion aggregators (only A-list bloggers and MSM are quoted).
invite code techcrunchlove doesn’t work
Will they be able to get the targeted traffic?