Some smart Redditer did a Google search for all the Reddit stories containing the words "It's Official" in the title. The idea, of course, is to show that the Redditers use this phrase way too much, be it for fun, or to make a story that isn't actually official in any way more plausible.

Immediately, I remembered all those "BREAKING" stories on Digg. The first time someone thought of using the word to make a news item seem more important, it was over. Soon, your story had no chance of making the front page if it didn't have "BREAKING" in it, and thus we have stories like "Breaking: Washington Governor Chris Gregoire endorses Obama," which is just as breaking as news about a new mobile phone being launched.

Nothing unexpected here: since everyone is trying to push his/her story to the top/front page, competition tough, and one has to adapt and use more and more tricks to succeed. The question is: will bad journalism and sensationalist titles win, or can the community somehow fix it and raise its own standards? Unfortunately, it seems to me that the more users a social news site has, the lower the standards.