Is Scoopit at death’s door?
Published October 28th, 2007 in Musings Tags: macroeconomics, scoopit, social bookarking. Scoopit Share it del.icio.us |Digg it |Furl |Netscape |reddit |StumbleUpon | ScoopitScoopit was a good idea … not a new idea but a good idea. It’s a useful aggregation of news stories that scoopit users think are important or newsworthy. That’s the idea at least, and that was the way it worked for the first few months but now unfortunately it is being abused.
The tagcloud now shows that the tag or keyword ‘macroeconomics’ is the most popular by a long shot. And as I write this the bulk of the stories on the front page are crap about the US financial market - all tagged with just ‘macroeconomics’.
And if you dig a little further you can see that all have been voted on by pretty much the same people (or at least the same usernames). Exibit I Exibit II
So the conclusion is some sort of organised campaign to populate scoopit with rubbish about ‘macro economics’.
You have to wonder why.
I think the folks over at scoop need to tighten things up a bit on scoopit before it becomes useless.
I think user driven content - especially media - is a good thing but the flipside is that it is very easy to abuse.
I think it would be good if scoopit users could vote things down and I think it’s time to do away with the anonymous voting.
10 Responses to “Is Scoopit at death’s door?”
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I’m very surprised at how scoopit is run. There’s no moderation at all and you don’t have to be logged in to vote.
I’m really close to deleting it from my feed list. I’m sick of all the crap about the sub-prime mortgage market. Hopefully they do tighten it up or it will be gone very shortly.
I agree with the above article in most parts. I have used Scoopit regularly for the better part of the last year and over the last few months i have noticed the increase in irrelevant content about ‘macro economics’ and Spain.
While i work at infonews.co.nz, our site is not a scoopit but a site for origional news content submitted by the user, i have also noticed the same approach attempting to infiltrate our site.
The predominant users who are posting the content are Kiwis living abroard.
We have contacted all the contributors in regard to \’forigen\’ content and explained our site a little better.
the response from those users was simple about getting the content message accross \’tell us when we sign up, and tell us when we go to post content that it needs to be NZ or relevant to NZ\’.
I think in some cases scoopit is undergoing some sort of spam, and in others simply user ignorance.
I still find scoopit useful for the NZ content as it has always been, but working your way through the US mortgage crap and the latest Spanish translation is starting to suffocate the site.
Others i know who have been regular users are no longer using the site as frequently as they had been too.
I hope scoopit is changed to NZ or relevant to NZ soon as it is a wonderful tool.
Gidday,
Good points. We\’ll see what we can do to fix it up. Macro-economics is not all crap BTW. Removing anonymous votes won\’t make it impossible for the macroguys to game it. What we need is more people voting stuff up.
@Alistair: Catch 22. You _need_ less spam so more people find it useful and in turn more people will vote. I agree that removing anonymous voting won’t help but the spam is pretty easy to detect. There needs to be more deleting of spammy accounts.
I find the macro-economics articles most useful, filling in the dots of the collapsing US economy and maybe US nation. Has huge implications for everyone - a 1929 style crash is on the cards and deepening war scenarios will also be accelerated which in turn could shut off the oil to our happy little lifestyles. Must buy some Gold and Swiss Franks along with my oil futures, attend a community gardening course and finish writing my new cook book - 26 Ways to Eat Rat.
I think you’ve hit it on the head Laurence.
Who are these people flogging commercial services on Scoopit ? There seem
to be a lot of faux vietnamese names among them such as ‘hungdung’ .. Unconscious racism, or a graduate of the Phoenix program ?
Whanake.
The flaw in the argument is that using an internationally connected system in the age of broadband, you cannot easily put up artificial barriers and live in some sort of splendid isolation. What happens elsewhere matters in NZ. Scoop has always carried considerable NZ content while remaining interested in global events. However Alastair and others have always carried the burden. Scoopit is an opportunity for broader participation. Rather than carping, it might be a good idea to contribute worthwhile material which people broadly appreciate and vote for .. rather than being subjected to posts - to quote the current \’Scoopit Pending\’ - for \’Insurance Directory\’, \’Health Directory\’, \’Jewelery Directory\’, \’Jewelery Directory\’, \’Alabama Directory\’, \’Asian Business Directory\’, and Financial Directory, by \’cong\’ and \’leduy1989\’.
I don\’t think Vietnamese people are that naive.
This is why I set up Linka.co.nz. O.K it doesn\’t have the user base that scoopit has, but if people signed up more and started posting and voting on there they would find it is a lot tighter controlled.
Both Linka and Scoopit are based off the same system and have the same functionality. In fact I would say Linka has better functionality, not that I am biased or anything. If you want a site for NZ content go to Linka.
There may be the odd post that has no relevance to New Zealand but it is probably something we thought would be interesting to most New Zealanders and as I say it would be the odd post.
Try it - you might like it
I think in some cases scoopit is undergoing some sort of spam, and in others simply user ignorance.
I still find scoopit useful for the NZ content as it has always been, but working your way through the US mortgage crap and the latest Spanish translation is starting to suffocate the site.