Oh? I've had the opposite impression. That Reddit adequately demonstrates that readers are impulsive, poorly informed, narrow-minded, and easily manipulated. On subreddits with the most passive style of moderation, the comment threads are a self-congratulatory shouting match where any contradictory information is shouted down regardless of its merit. On the other hand, where conversations are productive and good information is rewarded, those subreddits are moderated strictly and editorial control is frequently used to remove distracting comments or guide conversations.
In my opinion, Reddit validates the usefulness of a gatekeeper for news.
Journalism outlets, at least those operated in the traditional manner with a wall between business and copy, explicitly eschew this goal. The whole point of "church and state" separation in news outlets is to enable journalists to write about stories that readers probably wouldn't upvote, but is important for them to see. This sort of story will be given _much_ less exposure on sites that are single-mindedly optimizing for likability in general.
I think traditionally-operated news outlets serve a socially-useful function, and that the metamorphosis of these outlets into likability optimizers means everyone loses out. You may disagree, and that's your perogative!
The shared links that pop up all over my Facebook from friends and family who I otherwise wouldn't think would believe such nonsense says otherwise.
I still however believe people are smart on average, and are becoming better and better at thinking critically. Possibly a bit naive, but I hope as information becomes more accessible, people will only develop a better sense for what's bullshit (again, no matter who it's produced by).
It's not that they are not capable or smart, it's that they don't bother fact checking every single story or seek out opposing analysis or interpretation, especially for things like US foreign policy.
This has an opportunity cost.
1) Auto-categorization: Great if it works. I understand it's beta, but it isn't working now. For example, almost every story is labeled 'Controversy' including "High school football player gives best post game interview ever.", "Chocolate lab after the dog park" and other similar stories.
2) Auto-curation: Again, great if it works and I know it's beta, but the Technocrat view currently offers "LPT: The correct & easiest way to safely break up a dog fight", "California boy gets detention for sharing school-prepared lunch with another student", etc.
Those are hard problems; if you could solve them, count me in. Possibly I misunderstand your goals, but as the other poster said, they could use more explanation.
2) Where you using either the default views (technocrat for instance) or your own personal feeds? The articles selected are only as good as your feed filters on your different sites and the settings selected in the menu.
Thank you for taking the time to look at it!
2) I was using the Technocrat default view.
Sagebump sits ontop of your different aggregator site accounts.
BTW Thank you for taking the time to look at it!
You can see this near arrogance flow through much of the anecdotes. "Ugh, more and more PR people trying to get my attention all the time. It's sooo annoying." "Ugh, PR girls are even trying to sleep with me, but you can't compromise my editorial integrity." It's perfectly represents the entitlement of the gatekeeper role that must've been built into that last generation of journalists.
Sorry for the mild rant but sites like Hacker News and Reddit have shown that readers are plenty smart, and capable of sifting through the bullshit, whether produced by a corporation, a newspaper, or an individual. When news media held a monopoly on distribution and there were few sources of info, I understand the danger of a corporation holding the sole lifeline of info. That's no longer the case.