social news sites
A social news site is an online platform where users can post, share, rate, recommend, and comment on content, such as news articles, videos, images, podcasts, or blogs. This content can either be one’s own creation or come from external websites. A guiding idea is that the more interesting the content is found to be by the community of users, the more votes it will get and the more prominently the content will be displayed on the platform. In other words, content is generally ranked according to popularity. Popular content gets prominence and longevity, while unpopular content is buried over time.
The ability of social news site users to post comments about the content enables users to form a discussion based on the content. These comments may also be ranked according to popularity. The moderation of both content and comments depends on the respective site. For instance, front-page content is decided either by users as a voting community or by administrators. The prominence of content (and comments) is often managed by a particular algorithm. This entry provides an overview of social news sites, reflects on the context in which they came into being, discusses some of the most well-known examples, and concludes by discussing some of the concerns about these sites.
Overview
Social news sites generally incorporate social networking features, such as the ability to create personal profiles, designate friends, follow others’ activities, and/or facilitate one-on-one interaction. A wide range of topics is served by these sites, linking many types of information, from news, scandal, and humor, to finance, science, and technology. Consequently, they either serve fairly broad audiences such as the popular social news sites Digg or Reddit or cover particular topics, such as the niche site Slashdot, with a focus on science and technology. Finally, their significance lies in the observation that more and more people, and young people in particular, get their news online rather than off-line.
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The democratic potential of social news sites has been the topic of much discussion. First, they contribute to the creation of a virtual participatory sphere. Not only do they constitute a new and innovating way to participate in a community that is constantly being flooded with new information, but they also make it possible for users from across geographical boundaries to access the same information and respond to fellow users’ beliefs and views.
Second, they constitute new modes of gatekeeping power. By allowing individuals to transcend the hierarchical structure of mainstream, professional-commercialized media, and its lack of transparency regarding the news selection process more specifically, a platform is created in which users can decide what counts as news, based directly on their needs and desires. In a context in which news is no longer considered as an end product for passive consumption, social news sites facilitate citizen participation in the agenda-setting process.
Third, social news sites have become a postmodern form of citizen journalism. By facilitating a participatory culture, their collaborative nature has been hailed as producing a collective intelligence, with semi-journalistic practices that put an emphasis on processes of circulation, reconfiguration, and interpretation with regard to public information and discourse. In that regard, web-based practices such as reposting, linking, tagging, rating, modifying, or commenting upon news content are referred to as metajournalism.
Metajournalism as a term then emphasizes a participation by citizens in the news process in addition to genuine content creation—that is, producing original news content in terms of posting eyewitness commentary, photo and video sharing, or blogging. This has encouraged debates on the extent to which metajournalism is different from—or even inferior to—existing practices of journalism. In comparison to the revelatory function of more authentic forms of citizen journalism or modern professional journalism in terms of uncovering public and private wrongdoing, metajournalism has been criticized as a considerably less significant form of journalism. However, this is contrasted with interpretations of journalism as a complex and multilayered process in which events, issues, and ideas are made sense of, interpreted, and rearticulated. From this perspective, social news sites are regarded as opportunities for citizens to participate in this meaning-making process that ultimately (re)shapes news and comment, information, and discourse. Despite its nonprofessional and online character, metajournalism is then regarded as an integral part of journalism itself.
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Context
Social news sites are part of what is known as the social media phenomenon, that is, social media’s rapid and global adoption by active Internet users. Essentially, the concept of social media refers to the existence of online technologies that revolve around the creation, distribution, and sharing of content by audiences. Social media constitute various forms of online communities, which are generally believed to address, respond to, and fulfill people’s innate desire to connect with other people and belong to a community.
In addition to social news sites, social media can be subdivided in social networking sites (either popular, e.g., Facebook, or niche, focusing on particular topics or professions), blogs (e.g., Blogger or WordPress), microblogs (e.g., X [formerly Twitter] or Tumblr), media-sharing sites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, BookCrossing), virtual game or social worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft or Second Life), collaborative wikis (e.g., Wikipedia), and social bookmarking sites, which focus on sharing and storing bookmarks or links (either popular, e.g., Pinterest, or niche, e.g., Diigo). The latter are perceived to be quite similar to social news sites since these also often allow other users to vote on content.
Social media, and social news sites in particular, can be situated in the context of the emergence of Web 2.0 and user-generated content. In the late 1970s, the Internet was originally a large Bulletin Board System which was created to serve as a platform to facilitate information exchange between users. However, as the Internet evolved, it transformed into a network of hierarchical one-way relationships between the producers of information and its consumers.
In the mid-2000s, Web 2.0 as a term signified a shift from the Internet as a platform for individuals and organizations to publish and exploit content and applications to a platform where this content and these applications could be created and modified continuously by users in a collaborative and participatory fashion. Whereas content and applications such as personal homepages and the Encyclopædia Britannica represent Web 1.0, blogs and wikis represent Web 2.0. Driven by the rapid development of new functionalities and techniques such as real-time posting and commenting, hyperlinking, and RSS, online technologies increasingly enabled the creation of a dynamic, interactive environment, which came to replace a rather static environment. In this process, users were no longer passive observers of the web but active contributors to the web. The term user-generated content came to refer to the various ways in which end users make use of these possibilities, referring to media content that is publicly accessible (either in general or to a selected group of people), characterized by a particular creative effort, and created outside of both a commercial market context and professional routines and practices. Social media as a term then refers to Internet-based applications with user-generated content in a Web 2.0 context.
Examples
Slashdot was founded in 1997 and signified the early start for social news sites. Under the slogan “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters,” it focused mainly on science and technology-related news, which is posted, rated, and commented on by its users. However, following the success of articles on politics, its remit gradually widened. Stories (or corrections or updates) are submitted in the form of a summary together with a link to the respective news article. Each story subsequently becomes a potential topic of a threaded discussion. While submissions are moderated by Slashdot’s editorial team, the discussions are moderated based on a user-based moderation system with points to filter out abusive comments. Users earn karma based on these moderation points, which allow them to become moderators themselves after earning high karma. Editors make a daily choice among submissions for the front page.
Digg was established in 2004 and was the first to introduce a proper voting system, motivated by an explicit claim to reclaim the editorial selection process from professional elites. Members can post, repost, and rate content from external websites, ranging from commercial news outlets to blogs and amateur content. These new submissions are displayed on the upcoming section. Stories are ranked by popularity depending on the number of users that digg stories by casting a positive vote. The most popular stories appear in the popular section, which is also the default page of the site. Members can also bury stories by casting a negative vote, and a story is automatically deleted after a particular number of negative votes. The ranking of an entry is determined by an algorithm that includes multiple elements and is regularly adapted.
There is also a social networking aspect to Digg, since members can follow each other’s personal profiles. The content is focused on technology, humor, celebrity, and scandal. After several technical problems and negative user campaigns in 2010, and a change in ownership in 2012, Digg was relaunched as a news aggregator with an editorially driven front page, focusing on science, politics, and viral Internet stories.
Reddit was established in 2005, and its name is derived from the phrase “I read it on reddit.” Similar to the original Digg, users can vote and comment on content, there is no editing or moderation, and stories generally focus on human interest, entertainment, and technology. In contrast to Digg, this can be either a personal text post or a direct link from an external website. Furthermore, a vote directly affects an entry’s score as either an upvote or a downvote, with the highest scored articles appearing on the front page. User-created communities are referred to as subreddits and are generally based on specific news categories. For direct access to one another’s entries and comments, redditors can become friends. Following the shutdown of particular obscene subreddits, several debates on free speech ensued between the users and owners of the site. Last, similar to Slashdot, users can earn karma for the popularity of their links and comments.
Concerns have been expressed regarding the participatory and democratic aspects of social news sites. First, there are concerns regarding the political economy of social news sites, which are generally based on for-profit business models, involving advertising dollars and large-scale commerce. Second, there are concerns regarding their incorporation by traditional media corporations or by corporations in general as social media marketing tools. Third, it has been emphasized that gatekeeping power is still largely controlled by professional staff at elite media corporations, who mainly draw source material from large public and private institutions and their public relations agencies. Fourth, special interest groups have been found to instigate coordinated efforts to influence the prominence of stories on social news sites for political or financial reasons. Fifth, social news sites have been criticized for reducing the democratization of news to popular appeal, which represents quantitative values over qualitative values of newsworthiness and rational-critical debate. In this regard, their underlying idea is based only on liberal values, referring to the liberal-aggregative model of media and democracy and the efficient-market hypothesis in economic theory. This is potentially problematic since these sites generally suffer from several snowball effects: Stories on the front page have already been voted as most popular and are therefore most likely to further attract attention and popularity; less positively rated comments may refer to more alternative, radical perspectives, which, consequently, are less popular, and are easily filtered out; and users with large friendship networks often attract the most positive votes both on their stories and comments.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society