Someone go start this web site!

So I am a regular reader of two "News Voting" sites, Digg and Reddit. In case you're not familiar with the concept, the way they work is as follows: the site displays a list of web links (usually to news articles) that people have posted, and if you find that story interesting, you cast an "up" vote for it, or if you don't like the story, you can give it a "down" vote. The sites keep tabs of these votes, and the running vote tally determines which stories are displayed on the first page. This is cool because it guarantees that unlike CNN or Fox News, the bias of a few editors will not be able to shade your view of the news. This ends up exposing you to a lot of news stories or articles that you might not have seen otherwise. The underlying concept is cool, however there are three glaring faults that both Digg and Reddit suffer from.

First off, despite the promise of the general populace determining the balance of news stories, these sites end up leaning about as far left as you possibly can. This suggests that the average internet news reader is exceptionally liberal, as there are more Bush Impeachment stories on these sites than you can shake a stick at. Secondly, often times, things that get voted as popular aren't totally new things; sometimes they're just new to the voters on the site. So an item with a generic title of "hilarious pic!" often times turns out to be something from a two-year old email forward that enough people found novel to get it sufficient votes for front page.

My third complaint is by far the biggest, and it really takes a lot away from the potential that these sites have. Both sites allow users to post messages in a comments section for each article. This sounds like a good thing, because it should provide the ability to do some point/counterpoint discussions on various articles. However, in practice, the majority of comments you read on these sites are written by incredibly stupid people who usually haven't even bothered to read the article they are writing about. And while there are indeed a few thoughtful, intelligent comments here and there, they are far outweighed by the aforementioned morons who post un-thought out garbage with sub-8th grade grammar.

A different favorite website of mine, Fark.com, completely solves the third problem; its user community is one of the most sharp and witty of any I've encountered. However, Fark.com lacks the democratic voting systems that underpin Digg and Reddit; the articles available on the site are chosen by a handful of editors.

So what I propose somebody start is a vote-based news site like Digg or Reddit, but with some sort of IQ test required to vote or post in the comments section. Someone wanna get on that for me?