Fixing Newsvine
Background: For several years, I was an incredibly active member of the Newsvine community. Now I’m not. In my opinion, Newsvine is broken, but I think it can be fixed.
Here’s how.
Newsvine was unlike every other social media site I had ever seen, in that it was a place where liberals and conservatives could come together and have respectful debates. There were always flamers, of course, but most of the time it was a forum for a competition of ideas. I met a lot of people there, both liberals and conservatives, who I respected immensely. Calvin Tang and the rest of the Newsvine staff did an excellent job of making sure that both sides adhered to the Code of Honor. After MSNBC.com acquired it, though, it got too big. In the short-term, the acquisition was great; I got an invitation to cover the 2008 Republican National Convention and several of my peers got articles published on MSNBC.com. Now, though, it’s a site with far too many users and far too little moderation. The quality degraded, a lot of the old school writers left, and I don’t really use it any more. It’s a shame, and if Brian’s fixes were to be enacted, I might start using it again.
