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Challenges of social media

Posted on August 3rd, 2007 by reviewer.
Categories: Social Media.

Anyone who’s ever taken the time to read digg or other related user content driven sites has noticed that it’s not what news used to be. Slashdot has long been notorious for POV and headlines that exaggerate. Digg has the common problem of nonsensical descriptions.

The problem is really a lack of editors. Without a single standard to hold a social media site to they will be subject to a pantheon of grammatical styles, mistakes and diverse writing techniques.

On any given day you can look at the top ten stories on dig and at least half of them will have non descriptive tag lines and titles that tell you almost nothing about the story. Wikipedia is another social media site that doesn’t have this problem because they have a standard to which they hold articles. They have employed editors to watch for trouble and one of the most dedicated fanbases ever assembled.

Here’s the catch 22 about the whole thing. Digg’s style is amateur and yet the users keep voting for these stories. Just like in a free economy you’d think that the users would stop voting stories up that didn’t make sense but it doesn’t happen. Apparently digg users are happy with the backwards style.

Summation: The problem with social media is the same thing that drives it and makes it popular, people.

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