The same cycle repeats itself. First you have a small community of smart people, then it gets noticed and then the quality of the community drops like a rock after too many people want to join it. The same thing happens for real life communities, real-estate and online communities.
I frequent many socially aggregated websites, mainly places like reddit and slashdot. I've been hanging around there since the beginning of reddit and I have to admit that the quality of postings over there during the first few years was great. Now after the 4th or 5th year of the site being live and it catering to a very wide audience, there is a whole lot of uninteresting crap that gets posted out there. If you know anything about the LOL cat meme, then you know what I mean.
Digg, another social link aggregation site suffers the same problem and started which ironically, caused more of the "intelligent" users to move over to reddit, (there are sources out there on the net and I don't feel like doing the linking at the moment since I just want to get this post done).
The web 2.0 phenomenon was a great hit at first, as it got the social web started. I would venture a bet that it was first the technologically savvy and intelligent people that caught on first that that created the valuable communities which spured this movement; and now everyone and their dog can get into these communities which has changed the dynamics considerably.
What I believe next to happen is the anti-thesis of web 2.0, which is the creation of the filtered internet, and ideally it is you that decides what to filter, most notably, the golden needle from the hay.
This is an idea, which I believe will outlive the open, aggregated websites like Digg, Reddit and Slashdot, which is also open to corruption by people gaming these sites (ie with vote bots and etc).
Instead, I propose/expect to see vetted communities of people that can aggregate for good information. I believe that this phenomenon is also being (had been) repeated on Facebook, where the community used to be only university students and now, even your boss might be able to see what you've been up to... the vetting begins with the privacy controls to other people.
I think we will eventually start to move away from these sites and develop our own aggregation systems... starting with our friends.
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