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thenewgreen  ·  3818 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Plato's Republic: The Philosopher-Kings and Hubski

I like the use of Muzak to describe the problem. We refer to it as aggregation averaging.

What is aggregator averaging?

On traditional social aggregators like Digg and Reddit, the number of posts that can be seen on any one page is limited. Competition between posts ensues, and as the site becomes popular, this competition intensifies. To get attention, posts are given bombastic or baiting titles, like “Epic Fail”, or “Best Picture Ever!”. Also, posts with the most votes often have shallow, high-impact content like jokes, pictures, and memes.

By design, the posts seen on traditional aggregators are the ones that easily garner votes. In other words, in the aggregate, aggregators produce average content. -This is aggregator averaging.

Because of Hubski's sharing and re-sharing mechanism, the popularity of a post is based only on relationships, and not upon the majority vote. For this reason, we like to refer to Hubski as “a de-centralized social aggregator”.

We have some cool ideas in the works regarding how to be able to follow a user within a certain topic. -More to come here.

Thanks for the post achughes, be sure to let those that are interested in a more "decentralized" aggregation space know that they have a new potential home.