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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