This is in response to an article written by Goldrust, called Why I Hate Digg.

What I like about newsvine are the pictures in the articles and that it is like CNN or Abcnews, only you can comment and discuss every article. What I like about digg and what keeps me going back to there instead of here is the wider variety of articles and quickly changing content. I like the higher quality comments seen on slashdot. I almost never goto fark, but it is like newsvine Odd News taken to the Nth degree.

“On this site (and most intellectual oriented sites) you can do something about it to – defend your point of view.”

You can defend your point of view on digg like any other site. Generally I find /. comments to be better than diggs because of selective moderation system and their better comment threading system. Newsvines comment threading is more like digg than slashdot.

Newsvine is not more intellectual than digg or slashdot, but it is more biased. Only on newsvine will you see completely biased articles written by users displayed with the same importance as “unbiased” news from the associated press. The journalists who wrote those articles went to years of schooling to learn how to, at least try to, write unbiased articles. While the users on newsvine, in the large majority have had neither that training or the desire and as a result they flame on as ardently as possible.

I have several websites and to me publishing content to newsvine is like having a your own blog on newsvine. While this is all well and good I would rather post content to one of my personal sites than newsvine’s. I have more control over the look and feel and to many people (not me) their website is their source of income. I also find publishing content on newsvine to be harder than digg or slashdot or fark or reddit. There are just too many form fields to fill out.

I suggest that if you (goldrust) want your own blog to write about stuff you find on the net, go get yourself a blog and a plugin. You will find publishing content to be much easier.

I also think newsvine needs to remove “Type of Article: News Event ” option under the “Write An Article” choice for everyone except a select few official authors. This will prevent the all too many News Opinion or News Other articles making their front pages. Also user contributed content either needs to be more like /. where opinion articles are excluded from main pages or just have separate section on newsvine for user content.

If newsvine had less opinion articles (stuff that should go on a blog somewhere) displayed along with actual news from the associated press the website would be much better. At least with http://www.watchblog.com/ they separate everyone into their own corner so that when people go off on stem cell research or Bush than readers will be more prepared or more likely to dismiss the article as typical for whatever political ideologies that are biased in the article.

Mike Davidson and the rest of the newsvine team doesn’t want to allow users to mark down user-contributed content or to allow users to ban other users. It is very frustrating to many users to continually see content from users they disagree with on the front page. I feel newsvine should at least classify users into groups based on similar views or interests so certain users don’t drive others away.

Either Newsvine is completely user contributed biased articles or they are completely AP news. I think this blending of actual news with user content without classification of user bias will drive people away.