Social news
Social News (German: Soziale Nachrichten ) are an application on the World Wide Web in which users post references to news or content on another website with a short comment. Other users can vote for or against the contributions. The most popular posts are posted on the homepage. The users decide which messages are disseminated and prominently positioned. For this reason, one speaks of a news community .
Functions
Posts can be read by all visitors, and you usually have to register to post new posts. The same applies to commenting on posts. In some applications, registration is also necessary for voting. Registered users can in their profile u. a. indicate who their "friends" are, e.g. B. to be informed by e-mail when they post a new post. The total score of a post is often calculated using a secret algorithm that may be used. U. not only the number of votes for and against the contribution counts, but possibly also takes into account who voted. One of the reasons for this approach is the desire to prevent manipulation as far as possible. The articles often contain open or hidden advertising for a website. The submitter then tries to heave them onto the homepage, or simply submit them as a means of search engine optimization . The users also receive points for their activity, which are reflected in the user status, often referred to as karma . Points can be awarded for submitting contributions, commenting or voting and using an algorithm that also u. U. is kept secret, are summarized. The algorithm can e.g. B. also take into account the topicality of the activity or the success of the submitted contributions in terms of votes received. Algorithms that users find unfair can have a negative impact on activity.
The contributions can be assigned to predefined categories or submitted within groups set up by users. Most applications not only accept text, but also images and videos. Some websites also contain podcasts or allow original articles to be posted without reference to a website. Contributions can with keywords (Engl. Tags ) are provided that can be used to search for related articles and usually in the form of a tag cloud (Engl. Tag cloud ) and the frequency are displayed according to the homepage.
Some authors see social news as a form of social bookmarking , but while the latter focuses on collecting personal bookmarks (and possibly sharing them with other users), social news is about distributing and discussing news. They are accordingly seen as part of citizen journalism on the Internet.
providers
The most popular application by members and visitors was initially Digg . The website was initially devoted to technical news, but now includes articles on almost all areas of life. In Germany, a clone of the same name was launched, which was later renamed YiGG . Both services got into a crisis, however: YiGG never achieved the required critical mass of users and has since been discontinued, while Digg suffered a rapid loss of users after converting the software. However, what is currently by far the largest international social news platform by far benefited from this changeover: Reddit .
In this context, the term news aggregator has established itself above all . Virato and Rivva should also be mentioned as other services on the German market . With its Facebook Twitter press review, the Süddeutsche Zeitung has also found a way to show trends on the Internet, filtered by the readers themselves.
swell
- ^ Lerman, K .: User Participation in Social Media: Digg Study . In: Workshops of 2007 IEEE / WIC / ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT 07) , arxiv : 0708.2414v1
- ^ Goode, L .: "Social news, citizen journalism and democracy". In: New Media & Society , Vol. 11, No. 8, 1287-1305
- ↑ Forbes.com: "Facebook Didn't Kill Digg, Reddit Did," July 13, 2013
- ↑ Süddeutsche.de: “That recommends the world” , August 2, 2012