So the obvious question becomes: How does version 2 of social news prevent this? How does/will news.yc deal with it?
For the sake of argument (though it may be true anyways), what if we assume the Ron Paul voting is totally organic? What if over time a critical mass of existing reddit community members decided it was important to knee-jerk upvote any Ron Paul story without reading each story? So you have a block of legitimate users using the site for something other than the expressed goal of the site (social news), presumably to the detriment of the rest of the user base.
I mentioned one way of dealing with lame submissions when we switched news.yc to Hacker News: have human editors who mark good and bad submissions, and weight people's future votes depending on which they predict. That would probably be enough.
There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a subreddit for it. But of course this is what happened:
There are also mechanical solutions along the lines of the type used to defeat SEO. I.e. if a group of the same people always upvote the same stories, count their votes less. If people vote on something without reading it first, count their votes less. Etc.
The editorial solution is interesting. It's just a way to scale out the tastes of a group of editors beyond the articles they can look at themselves. If it works well then eventually the only users who would stick around would be people with similar taste to the editors.
The subreddit did not work because they did it backwards. You don't ask users you don't want to move somewhere else. You leave the bad users where they are and move yourself to a new site. Sounds familiar.
> There are other possible solutions. For example, the reddit guys tried to solve the problem of all the political crap on the frontpage by creating a subreddit for it.
That would probably have worked better if people were forced to choose a subreddit for their submissions, and stories from all subreddits got aggregated onto the main reddit page - and logged in users could choose not to see links from certain subreddits. (That's an aspect of slashdot that does work quite well.)
The idea of a popular and high quality "social news" site is fundamentally broken. Either you want a mass market or you want quality content. The mass market has an IQ of 100 and will not choose content that generally appeals to people here puzzling over "social news". Any fix that gets rid of the stuff morons like will cost you the mass market.
The metafilter people already went through all this. They started to achieve mass market popularity and quality started to go to shit. They cut off new membership and let attrition get rid of some people. Then they were happy again with their small community.
If you introduce an editorial role, well guess what, it's not "social news" anymore. Slashdot and Fark are far from new and web2.0.
This problem is nothing new. Look at reddit's sister company, Wired. Wired went from great in the 90s to mostly moronic and consumerist now. It's also a lot more popular now.
For the sake of argument (though it may be true anyways), what if we assume the Ron Paul voting is totally organic? What if over time a critical mass of existing reddit community members decided it was important to knee-jerk upvote any Ron Paul story without reading each story? So you have a block of legitimate users using the site for something other than the expressed goal of the site (social news), presumably to the detriment of the rest of the user base.