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Comment by zyfo | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks this whole sharing business has gone a bit too far?

Honestly, how many people would say that finding content is one of their biggest problems today?

It's easy to think all you need is more optimized/better content while what you really need in fact is probably something of the following:

- think about something

- focus your attention

- get to work

- get in touch with other people

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Finding good content is a problem for me in the sense that content consumption has become a new form of entertainment. So if you don't entirely dismiss entertainment, then, yes, finding good content I will enjoy and maybe learn something from is a problem to me. The main issue I see here is that the incentives in social networks are all wrong: we're being prodded into over-sharing because that's where the money is. As a result of that we're drowning in a shit-stream of content.

Imagine Facebook with this rule: when a user posts content, that content is rated by popularity (number of likes/shares/comments). Every user has a popularity score. Users can opt in to being ranked on a public popularity list in, let's say, up to 3 categories like Sports, Tech, Music, Politics, etc. Any FB user can check out the "top 50" lists for topics they're interested in, and subscribe/friend/follow people that are on those lists.

Why are you asking me to imagine Facebook with the rule that it's Reddit and not Facebook?

So you're basically saying that the solution to our content quality problem is turning it into a popularity contest?

Categorized popularity. If a user in interested in a topic, they would have the ability to find the prominent voices related to that topic.

Sparks in Google+ seem like a step in the right direction, but it seems lacking. Though I cannot pinpoint exactly how I would improve it.

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