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Is there some good reason publishers shouldn't have an API to submit their stories automatically and then let the votes do their thing? The concepts of an offic

Is there some good reason publishers shouldn't have an API to submit their stories automatically and then let the votes do their thing? The concepts of an official content feed and democratic filtration of stories are not mutually exclusive.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
nooneelse 14y ago
The initial work-function of someone submitting a link is the first filter for if something is good/"worth other people looking at". Taking it away means more stress on the remaining levels of filtering. So if the same things are to get through the sum of all filters, either the remaining levels will need to be more robust to compensate for taking away the first filter, or the first level should just be kept in place. More abstractly, are there to be no places where people, real humans, can talk with each other without the advertising machines wedging their obnoxious way between us uninvited? Surely you can see there is some value in having such places. If the populous of reddit wants it to be such a place, then spammers are like someone at a party trying to sell watches to everyone rather than conversing. The hosts have asked them to cool it or leave. These particular louts didn't cool it, so the hosts pushed them out the door.
scotttobejoking 14y ago
The good reason is that that would be trying to present a technical solution to what is a personal conflict of interest. The basic problem is that people's stories are competing for eyeballs - a personal conflict - and that people are not satisfied with a fair resolution with that conflict (letting the general public decide). They are seeking an unfair level of exposure. You can't solve the basic problem of conflict technically; the best you can do is to provide fair tools. Trying to provide tools for content access, though, is unrelated (orthogonal, really) to the issue of fairness. Changing how the content is delivered won't really change things. Either it will be fair (everyone can submit to the API) or it won't be. If it is fair, then every smart publisher will publish to the API (heck, who wouldn't want to autopublish their blog to reddit?) and the result will be a pretty useless firehose :-D If it's not fair, then you're undercutting democratic filtration...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

nooneelse 14y ago

The initial work-function of someone submitting a link is the first filter for if something is good/"worth other people looking at". Taking it away means more stress on the remaining levels of filtering. So if the same things are to get through the sum of all filters, either the remaining levels will need to be more robust to compensate for taking away the first filter, or the first level should just be kept in place. More abstractly, are there to be no places where people, real humans, can talk with each other without the advertising machines wedging their obnoxious way between us uninvited? Surely you can see there is some value in having such places. If the populous of reddit wants it to be such a place, then spammers are like someone at a party trying to sell watches to everyone rather than conversing. The hosts have asked them to cool it or leave. These particular louts didn't cool it, so the hosts pushed them out the door.

scotttobejoking 14y ago

The good reason is that that would be trying to present a technical solution to what is a personal conflict of interest. The basic problem is that people's stories are competing for eyeballs - a personal conflict - and that people are not satisfied with a fair resolution with that conflict (letting the general public decide). They are seeking an unfair level of exposure. You can't solve the basic problem of conflict technically; the best you can do is to provide fair tools. Trying to provide tools for content access, though, is unrelated (orthogonal, really) to the issue of fairness. Changing how the content is delivered won't really change things. Either it will be fair (everyone can submit to the API) or it won't be. If it is fair, then every smart publisher will publish to the API (heck, who wouldn't want to autopublish their blog to reddit?) and the result will be a pretty useless firehose :-D If it's not fair, then you're undercutting democratic filtration...