I am fascinated by the success of collective editorial portals such as Digg, Reddit or even Scoopeo (thanks François). Not only do they have managed to replicate most of the golden rules of magazine publishing – “a good headline can sell a bad article”, “pictures sell the whole thing”, “year-on-year subjects do well” and “memes are selling us out” – but they also developped an invisible publisher’s bias. This article investigates how the “collective editorial work” produces a so predictable result. But I found a very good point at the end of the comments, arguing that the real power you get on a community is the time you can spend on it :
To make social networking sites more useful and give a better variety of material, I would recommend limiting the number of times per day that each person can submit, recommend, and bury stories. That would keep the people who practically live on these sites from totally dominating them.
