Giving up on Social News Networking

The whole idea of social news networking is to post stories that people, and yourself find interesting. What started off as a good idea also had the additional side effect of SEO, sites need and want those links back to their own sites, as it helps build page rank or whatever ranking system the search engines use.

The best side benefit of the whole process is that it also helps new blogs and new writers get better exposure while waiting for the search engines to catch up with majorly dynamic web sites like blogs. The problem with it is that the bigger systems are cutting out the little folks due to spam algorithms, or other algorithms that identify single blog posters as spammers.

Without some kind of quality control, we know that the blog aggregators and self-promotion systems like Reddit, Digg, stumbled upon, and Netscape will be overrun with cheap ads for pharmaceuticals, sex, web cams, and a whole host of other ills.

This morning this blog started getting reports from folks that the URLS we write from are being actively banned today at one of the social news sites, and when we went to go look, the entire site had been removed from their directory for violating their terms of service.

That was annoying, and something that we should have expected much earlier than today. Faced with the idea of having whole bodies of work waxed by the site, we have gone back to see what the other bigger sites have done, and found out that lifehacker and gizmodo have had similar experiences, and have instituted a policy that self promotion is strictly off limits.

Using that example, like many other blogs we are calling it quits when it comes to social news networking sites. If folks cannot post the stuff they find interesting, then it makes no sense to use these sites in the first place. We will leave the social buttons at the bottom of the articles, but we can no longer guarantee that they will work at all.

The problem is that the same blocks that work against spammers work against new bloggers who need the exposure that social news networking sites offer. Mainly a way to reach an audience from the start, an audience that is needed if the small bloggers media empire is to start. It is like jumpstarting a car, which at times is necessary so you can get to where you want to go.

This is part of a bigger problem, one that encompasses spam blogs, bloggers who are active in their own SEO, the use of social news networking sites, terms of service, and all the things that gut the whole idea of social networking. So doing the right thing here, just stopping for a while, mostly because the whole process is broken, and until it gets fixed, there is little to no point in working with the social news gathering web sites.