User:Austintajiri/Social news

A social news website is a type of website that features user-submitted stories that are ranked based on popularity. Popular social news websites include Slashdot, Fark, Digg and Reddit.

Popular social news websites
The most popular social news websites are Slashdot, Fark, Digg and Reddit.

Slashdot
Slashdot, started in 1997, was one of the first social news websites. It focuses mainly on science and technology related news. Users can submit stories, and the editors pick out the best stories each day for the front page. Users can then post comments on the stories.

Fark
Fark was started in 1997, and featured news of any topic. On Fark, users can submit articles to the administrators of the site. Each day, these administrators pick out 50 articles to display on the front page.

Digg
Digg, launched in December of 2004, introduced the voting system. This system allows users to "digg" or "bury" articles. "Digging" is the equivalent of voting positively, so that popular articles are displayed first. "Burying" does not lower an articles score. However, if an article is buried enough times, it will be automatically deleted.

Reddit
Reddit is another social news site where users can vote on articles and comments. Unlike Digg, users can directly affect the article's score. An "upvote" will increase the score and a "downvote" will decrease it. Articles with the highest scores will be displayed on the front page. There is also a page for "controversial" articles, that have an almost equal number of upvotes and downvotes. Reddit also introduced a system of user-created communities called "subreddits," which are essentially categories for a specific type of news.

Features
All social news websites allow the users to submit the content in some way. Each site differs in how the content is moderated. On Slashdot and Fark, for example, the administrators of the site decide which articles make it to the front page. On Reddit and Digg, the articles that get the most votes from the community will make it to the front page.

Many social news websites also feature a comment system, where users can form a discussion based on each article. Some of these sites have also applied their voting system to the comments, so that the most popular comments are displayed first.

Digg vs. Reddit
Since the launch of Reddit, a large portion of the social news website user base has been split between Reddit and Digg. This was until August 2010, when the newest version of Digg was launched. This new version took much of the power away from users, so on August 30, 2010, many Digg users switched to using Reddit. This was evidenced by a massive drop in traffic to Digg and increase in traffic to Reddit after August.