Have you been to Digg lately? Yes? Then you’re probably an apolitical male in the lower levels of technology as a career and lifestyle. Everyone else has largely been chased out of there; the intellectual gene pool is self-selecting for inbreeding as a function of the way the system has been set up and the way the system has been gamed. It rewards people who form reward-based gangs to muscle the conversation in various directions, and it works very efficiently at this. It works this way in every social bookmarking network, as far as I can see.
The half-life of a useful community seems to be shrinking as well, as the gamers catch on that the games themselves are tranferable and they can simply take the exact same plan to wherever pops up next.
Reddit, for which I once had some hope, is quickly becoming a ghetto populated by amusing pictures of questionable provenance and American politics, period, which is a shame. With a wider base to begin with, and less scope for self-serving blather, there was every possibility that it could have become a general interest site with enormous reach, but that, obviously, didn’t happen. Part of the reason was the inability to categorize your submissions, so that everything was simply thrown into a huge pool (there are Sub-reddits for uh, for uh, for two things that apparently don’t interest me enough to remember them at all) and thus the single most popular conversation quickly becomes the only functioning one at all, as all other conversations are marginalized off the radar screen. And its functions facilitate vendetta: you can view everything posted by an individual, and just click through the whole list, downvoting things without reading them; as I type this, I’m losing points at reddit as someone does this very thing to my profile.
Truemors is very new, and entirely unfocused, but as yet it’s not reached a critical mass. A site based on rumours needs a certain minimum number of people who are both informed of interesting facts and of mixed enough loyalty to share them with strangers rather than keeping them to themselves. Guy Kawasaki‘s base does not consist of those people, let’s just say that, and there are times when it feels like I’m the only person who is NOT a marketer who’s posting to that site or even reading it. What it becomes will depend entirely on who it reaches; if he’s planning for the long term (which he probably is not) he should make it work as a Facebook add-on and recruit students, because in a couple of years they’ll be exactly who and what he needs for this site. As for right now, trolling Consumerist or some of the political sites might be more useful, because that’s where you find the vast disgruntled.
In each case, it looks like the way to keep the conversations meaningful is to keep the conversations separate. Fark has its niche and it rules it well, because it knows this lesson and it is edited by a dictator, yet another useful tip. If the techies want to talk tech, give them a tech forum for that or they’ll gang up and steal your site. If the politicos want to release media statements every fifteen minutes and flood the front page, give them a place to talk to the politically minded or rant into dead space as the case may be, so they don’t hijack more than their NVIP section. If you want to host one global metaconversation, the only way to prevent the hijacking seems to be to make distinct sandboxes and pull the most popular stories from each, which should be done by a dictator with a heart of stone and backbone of molybdenum steel. Ongoing antigaming action should be a given, but it’s not. If you build it and it functions, that does not necessarily mean it’s functioning as you intended it to; just ask a guy who builds guns for a living and who gets shot.
Now, us literati and other dwellers in the virtual Montparnasse get our own sandbox to play in, as Gawker reports. While we have an entirely too well-documented tendency to become addicted to gambling (and what are futures, if not gambling, eh?) Media Predict will, in all probability, be co-opted by some smart criminal who realizes that the methods of taking over a site like this are well established, widely available, and free to implement. Offer payouts in real money, have your army of runners collect the cash, skew the odds, and rake in the dollars from people who dare not turn you in lest they implicate themselves.
Oh. Wait. I need money. brb.
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raincoaster 
Wholeheartedly agree with you about the zeta male problem on most of those networking sites. I check digg and reddit sometimes for blog material, and vote up the odd thing, but I’ll leave them to their sandbox, for the most part. Thanks for the link to The Consumerist; it’s a great site! Is there a Canadian equivalent? One which doesn’t have the Canadian disease of dull earnestness and earnest dullness, that is?
Have we at last got a photo of the formidable Monsieur Metro, in a good mood …
Actually, that shot’s a little dated. It’s from my glam phase.
defrostindoors,
It should be noted that dull earnestness and earnest dullness has spread across North America rather quickly; its’ infection rate has been accelerated by rampant suburbanization. Americans afflicted with these maladies tend to substitute a rather distasteful variety of passive-aggressive petulance in lieu of that trademark Canadian charm.
Agree wholeheartedly. You should see the shitstorm I started at Gawker yesterday. All I said was, “all the cat people I know are either fat or neurotic vegans.” And guess what? It’s true. From the reaction in the comments thread, I should have added a third category: REALLY REALLY TOUCHY.
No Canadian equivalent to the Consumerist at the present time. Hey, I bet there’s a market for it, though.
Hi Robert,
Actually, I would say that Canadians are far more passive-aggressive than Americans; we’re conditioned to avoid direct expression as it may offend someone (even if it’s just by being direct rather than the content of our words). We’re just as aggressive and vile as Americans can be; we’ve just learned to hide it better.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, don’t tell! We’ve got them fooled!
raincoaster,
I’m sorry to hear that. That’s pretty surprising to read, considering how much fun most of the posters who frequent the Gawker Media sites usually are. Since it’s basically impossible to type anything disparaging (or just harmlessly amusing) about even the most obscure or unimportant group at this point without insulting somebody, I can only recommend for people to insult maliciously with an intent to troll; at least then you’ll pre-empt and have some control over the situation in question.
defrostindoors,
I’ll never trust you people again.
Well, New York Media and cat people are pretty synonymous. But I didn’t know they didn’t realize they were fat and/or neurotic. Didn’t Woody Allen tell them? Looks like Choire at least got it and is running with it; I may be banned again soon, but their jabs at cat people will be my legacy. As for the “insulting with intent to troll” well, yes. I am ALL OVER that shit. Now you see why you shouldn’t trust us?
Rain, I’ve thought of another site: http://www.wikio.com
It’s basically a news feed, but you can vote on it. Posts are submitted automatically, so you don’t have to input them yourself. I get a fair bit of my horsey news from it, aksherly.
Ah, that DOES look interesting. So you can train it like the filter on reddit, only instead of training it for everyone, you’re training it only for yourself. Now that’s a huge improvement.
Also, check out the old post on reddit. The down-modder I pointed out got pissy with me in the comments section.
Which one was that? Also, don’t mention wikio on reddit or the zeta males will ruin that one too. I kind of imagine them being a bit like this. Funny how these nerds love to claim ownership of online space.
Ee-yup.
This is a slightly more weighty discussion of the same issue:
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2007/06/wikigroaning-an-wikipedia-article-length-redux.html
It’s sad, digg has gotten a lot of positive media in the NYtimes an other papers, but they really are, as you said, dominated by low-level tech boys. I swear I can smell the dirty socks and stale pizza every time I visit that site. Media Predict is addictive, but it’s too focused on television.
Thanks for your thoughts. Digg has gotten a little better, and is now open to new ideas and humour in a way it wasn’t before, but reddit is now a sinkhole. It’s incredibly cliquey, political, and full of sock puppets. I posted a brand-new story that I got off a blog that got it off Filipino radio, and the first comment was “Where’s the major news organization report?” I have pretty much given up on them all, and they have pretty much given up on me, too.