Editorial: How social news websites changed the web

March 22nd, 2007

The term of “social news” isn’t a new one, but it was popularized in the past few years. Wikipedia defines it as the process of allowing users to submit, vote on, and make the news. Users choose what is shown to them. Therefore, social news websites are also called news aggregators.
When the web was still 1.0, communities of any kind were rare and mostly, the Internet consisted in static content, published by the so-called webmasters for the readers. With the evolution towards web 2.0, everything is running towards community-based activities. Forums are transforming intro blogs and classic news sites are tending to become social news sites.

As with all Web 2.0 applications, social news sites are heavily based on user interaction and user will. The ideology is that really interesting news that are worth it will be more voted by users, thus creating a relevant ranking. This is a good system as long as no ones tries to manipulate the vote results. But social news sites are also great traffic drivers and there are a great deal of webmasters that try to generate large amounts of traffic to their websites. Manny social news sites try to stop this by creating complex ranking algorithms and by banning both users and entire websites. Of course there will always be mean to trick the system, means such as group voting and other ways in which users genera false votes.

Given the development of Web 2.0 we can expect that social news sites will develop, along with other forms of mass communication, into more user-oriented content that will become the core of Web 2.0 and the Internet.

A recent statistic shows that social news website are now generation over 1/4 of the overall WWW traffic, and this figure is continuously increasing every day. This means more and more users are using these websites to find out about the latest news, and regular news feeds and papers are losing ground fast.

However, social news websites changed the way I’m now searching for news online. Did they have any effect on you?