3by9

Trusting Editors To Show You The Path

In last week’s podcast (posted today because I’m an idiot) we had a good discussion about editors on social sites. Much has been said on this topic, most of it negative like Wired’s piece on the Digg “bury brigade” but I have a different view: I think editors are needed.

At Chawlk clips we display what you’d normally find at social voting sites: upcoming clips and popular clips which is displayed by default. What we have that you probably won’t find anywhere else are editor picked clips — articles and links that someone hand-selected as being of value regardless of how many votes it has. We care about popular vote counts everywhere else, but here. Democracy wins some of the time.

Why do we have clips that are moved to the top of a particular section manually? Because we feel that these articles should be noticed, perhaps noticed even before they hit the popular listing. Certain links are just too good and too time-sensitive not to put right at the top from the start. At social voting sites like Digg and Reddit, I have seen numerous articles get to the front page and the description goes something like this:

Yeah so this is the 2nd time I submitted it… the first time went nowhere. 

If the article was good enough to make it to the front page the second time it was submitted, what went wrong the first time? Perhaps it was overzealous buriers, maybe it was posted at the wrong time, maybe the first 50 people who saw it were completely unrepresentative of the larger site audience, but regardless the fact is that if it hadn’t been submitted a 2nd time then that particular article would not have been displayed on the site.

Having editor-picked items work is a direct function of the trust the users have of the people who are doing the editing. If you trust people to do “the right thing” then will you trust the articles they deem important and interesting?

On the other hand, if the people you trust aren’t necessarily the editors on the site but simply other users, what do you do in that scenario? Well we have you covered there as well. Our “top friends” page only displays posts from users you’ve deemed to be your top friends and no one else: like your own personal editors. (You’ve got to be logged-in to see the page work.) So whether it’s random people you trust or your close friends, having people select and recommend things to you is important right along side what the crowd thinks.I won’t argue and say which is more important, as that’s left for you to decide.