I’ve been thinking lately about social news sites. Sites like reddit and digg. They were interesting ideas at their inceptions, but increasingly lend themselves towards complete crap.

If I see another lolcat, another duplicate article about this or that presidential candidate, or something else on global warming, I just might have to take my own life. I rarely visit these sites (that I used to spend hours on a day) anymore. I tend to let my friends filter the news for me, they seem to do a much better job than the mob does.

It’s like everyone on these sites is playing in and throwing around their own vomit, it gets ridiculous. Television is sensationalized and content censored to reflect the bias of the producers, which tends to reflect the fact that media moguls own quite a bit more than just the news outlets. There are quite a few moments though were I would rather watch television than see what new stories have made the front page on Reddit.

I love newspapers because even if they cover the same dead horse topics, there’s always the opinion page. Local papers tend to be my favorite, because of the tight knit community talking about how issues actually impact them, you look in the “letters to the editor” page, and you recognize names of people you know, and you get to hear what they have to say.

The best opinions on anything, or at least the most interesting opinions, are rarely those of the mainstream. How often do you get to hear those? Even on Digg, or Reddit, it’s hard to come by something that’s actually all that interesting, because they all rely on the mainstream media to bring stories to their attention; it’s herd behavior at it’s worst.

I do however look forward to seeing the next iteration of social news sites. I myself have dozens of ideas for how these sites could be improved, and I think there really is something to be said about leveraging the power of a group of people who have a genuine interest in news finding interesting stories and raising community awareness.

Here are two of my ideas for improving social news:

1. Eliminate the democracy. Winston Churchill said, “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” Things have not changed much since his day and age.

Editorial oversight of user submitted stories would make things a great deal better, I think, although it could discourage users from submitting material. There are quite a few ways that you could implement this while minimizing the drop in use submissions.

2. Social DKP. DKP is an acronym for Dragon Kill Points. It’s basically a currency system used in MMO’s to encourage members of guilds to adhere to a set of standards and encourage regular contribution to the guilds progression through the game.

If a site were to reward those who contributed the most with IPhones, Ipods, or new graphics cards, I’d be prepared to wager 100 DKP the quality of stories, would greatly increase.

What do you think? Can social news aggregation be improved? If so, how? If not, why?