Why social news bugs me

Social news is supposedly about democratizing news information by letting users vote up or down stories. The promise is that mainstream media or ruthless media moguls will not be able to control the flow of information anymore. The concept is quite interesting but the execution is not.

I just submitted, what I thought, was an interesting post regarding an ad campaign that Michael Bloomberg is running on Gmail. Within seconds, my post had been down-voted on reddit and banished away forever. On the other hand, the current second "hottest" post on reddit is:



Which leads to this paragraph: "New information has been released regarding the sperm whale that came into the mouth of Tampa Bay over the weekend."

News, indeed.

The question: Do I eliminate my links to Digg, Reddit and others in protest? I will lose a lot of traffic... hmm.