The reason the traditional first date used to be dinner and a movie was because the movie gives you something to talk about during dinner. The value of the movie is not only the quality of the movie itself, but also its ability to give you something to talk about.

This is why newspapers lose when they prevent readers from commenting on their articles. The reason most people read the paper is that it gives them social currency with others. The value of the paper is directly proportional to its ability to serve as an object of sociability. Make the experience more social and the value goes up, less social and the value goes down.

Which is why Reddit has it all backwards.

The idea of content aggregators like Reddit is that they link to the best stories on the web. These stories are then supposed to serve as objects of sociability that generate interesting discussion. And I think most of us will agree that what makes one aggregator good and another bad is as much about the quality of the discussion as it is about the quality of the stories themselves. So far so good.

The problem here lies with the greater fuckwad theory. That is, once a content aggregator reaches a certain number of eyeballs there becomes an irresistible temptation to cause a little high-visibility mischief. Or a lot of high-visibility mischief. And so the quality of discussion seems to be capped at a certain fixed signal-to-noise ratio. If formatted the same, on some days you'd be hard pressed to tell whether you were reading the comments on Reddit or YouTube.

So the point of the content is to create interesting discussion. But as a site's popularity increases, the probability of having an intelligent discussion approaches zero.

How can we solve this?

Traditionally, the output of social systems is thought to be a combination of the intrinsic qualities of the people there and the systemic forces that drive their interaction. With content aggregators, these two factors are responsible for both the content that makes the front page and the quality of the discussion. The problem here is that the factors required to choose good content may be different from those required to produce good discussion. And what's more, the factors that encourage insightful content are almost certainly different the factors that encourage informative, interesting, and funny content.

Because of this it seems likely that there either there is no single set of people and systemic forces that will produce both a wide range of quality content and quality discussions, or else if there is then it will be prohibitively hard to find.1

So why not cut out the middleman? Instead of of linking to interesting content, why not link directly to interesting discussions?

Think of all the benefits:

A) Being generous, there are maybe ten or fifteen articles and blog posts a day that are genuinely insightful. Each of these articles creates dozens if not hundreds of discussions. Instead of trying to find the perfect blend of people and systemic forces to create a new discussion from scratch for each article, why don't we simply link to interesting discussions that are already happening across the web?

B) Linking to discussions is an excellent means of finding quality content. Interesting discussions almost always have an interesting source, whereas content that seems interesting may in fact produce only vapid discussion. This is especially true in a world where the stories that top the content-aggregators are mostly chosen by twelve year old boys. When I was twelve just about every online discussion thread seemed insightful simply because when you've only been literate and online a handful of years, every idea seems new and fresh.

C) When using a content-aggregator to create discussions, you are always talking with the same limited group of people. This rapidly leads to a stagnation of ideas and users outgrowing the virtual discourse group. When aggregating discussions from around the web this problem would be greatly reduced.

D) There are certain classic pages that pop up on content-aggregators every few months, which most net natives are more than sick of seeing by now. There are also most likely several thousand classic discussion threads, but since no one has ever made a discussion aggregator before the majority of them would seem completely fresh.

E) Linking to a seven-year-old article is lame because it's out of date. Linking to a seven-year-old discussion is just as interesting now as it was back then, if not more interesting because of it's added historical interest.

I'm not claiming that there is no value to traditional content-aggregators, in fact they can be quite useful. However, since the value of the discussion is as great or greater than the value of the content, it makes sense to at the very least try aggregating discussions in addition to aggregating content, if only to see what happens.

[1] The exception is with certain niche aggregators like where you have a relatively small number of like-minded people.