More Signal, Less Noise

As mentioned before in a previous post that as you get more users inputting information onto a website, the more that quality degrades, we have admission of this happening here from Arstechnica, a technology website that I've frequented for quite some time.

"Today, I would like to discuss with our community the recent decline in both quality and civility in our front page news discussions/comments. While I remain proud of our community discussions on articles, and while I acknowledge that they are far superior to the status quo online, things have taken a turn for the worse in recent months.

As much as we might like to believe that it is related simply to controversial topics, such as the iPad or climate change, the fact is that we see the problem all over the place, in all sorts of topic areas. And it's not just the staff. In recent months, long-time readers (people who have been here for nearly a decade or more) have complained publicly and privately about the decline in quality and civility." - Arstechnica: More signal, less noise: cleaning up our comments

And there you have it. So the million dollar question (that probably google is out to solve) is how does one separate good information from the bad? In any circumstance if you're good at it, then there's plenty of money to be made for you.