A hybrid mashup of social networking and user review sites, some (e.g. Digg, Reddit) are purely user-driven while others (Slashdot, Fark) rely on moderators to pick and choose the best articles. This post looks at how a few of the biggest sites work, along with some tips on how to get the most from them.

Digg

The biggest of all the social news sites, Digg, relies on its huge member pool for the constant stream of stories that populate its front pages. From IT, business, science and politics, to entertainment, sports and lifestyle stories, you’ll also find no small number of ‘comedy’ viral videos and inane forwards.

Stories are submitted and ‘Dugg’ by users alone, so it’s inevitable the top stories often lean a little too much towards top ten lists, tabloid tales and YouTube clips. But really good stories have a way of rising to the top, and members can ’shout’ a story to their friends if they like it, so if you invest the time to find like-minded users it’s won’t be long before you’ve streamlined your reading material.

Tips for beginners:

Be selective. If you want to build a useful friend list, look at users’ histories. Stick to regularly active Diggers and commenters in topics that interest you; avoid those who submit lots but don’t Digg or comment much. And spend time building your Digging history before adding people en masse – you’ll be taken more seriously if your profile meets the same criteria you’re looking for in others.

Don’t be a flagrant self-promoter  - submit and Digg a variety of websites, and don’t harass your new ‘friends’ with shouts for every story you find; good friends will watch your submissions and Digg the best ones of their own accord, and a shout tends to get more responses if the story already has a following. Be realistic – if a story has barely scraped 15 Diggs after 12 hours, accept it’s not of wide interest, save your shout for another day and move on.

Join in! If you want your favourite stories to be read, don’t simply add and spam the first 10,000 users you find. Instead get your name out there; comment on stories and moderate others’ comments; use the shout feature to hold more personal conversations about stories; and most of all – Digg!

Slashdot

The polar opposite to Digg, Slashdot takes user submissions, but relies on a team of moderators to sift through them and pick out the most informative and interesting. The focus is narrower too – mainly IT, science and politics – but if they’re your primary interests it makes for a much more powerful site than Digg’s scattergun approach.

Every selected story gets its time at the top of the front page – along with a detailed summary and often an opinion from the moderator – and every story gets heavily commented on by the site’s intense crowd. The techie focus means the stories themselves are usually accurate and detailed, and there is a primitive ‘Firehose’ of current submissions which allows users to vote stories up to the moderators’ attention.

Tips for beginners:

If you find a good quality story to submit, take the time to come up with a summary that gives a good taster of the content without giving everything away, perhaps along with a pull quote or two to add character. Put the HTML link to the story at an appropriate point in your text; if you have any related links or previous Slashdot stories, link to them where appropriate.

Check the last few days to make sure your story hasn’t already been posted, keep your headline simple and to the point, and always link to the original source as well if the story was broken elsewhere. Most importantly, don’t be put off or offended if your story is rejected; that’s the reason Slashdot’s often a better read than non-moderated sites.

Delicious

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) essentially takes your list of bookmarked sites and turns them into Digg-like democratic votes. Search Delicious for a topic and you’ll see what everyone else has bookmarked. It’s a little different to Digg in that actually taking the time to bookmark a site feels less of a throwaway thing than just clicking a button to vote, so it tends to more accurately reflect the quality of a page. That said, it can make it less likely to stumble across those genuinely different sites that Digg throws up.

StumbleUpon

Speaking of stumbling upon a site, this service does exactly that. Sign up, submit an interesting story with a brief description and it’s added to the list. Then other users simply select the topics they’re interested in and hit the ‘Stumble’ button to be directed to a randomly selected submission. If you like it you vote it up, if you don’t you vote it down, and this then influences the likelihood of other people stumbling upon it. A great-looking site and a surprisingly addictive way to while away a spare hour, as you genuinely have no idea what’s coming next.

Reddit

Although it could unkindly be described as the ugliest news site on the internet – like Digg with every bit of style stripped away – it actually has a pretty loyal and intelligent fanbase, and the stories are similar in content and tone. It works the same way, with submitted stories being voted up or down the front page, but the long list is constantly evolving, and therefore easier for new stories to break big at the top, which is something Digg is often criticised for.

Fark

Finally, Fark is a more light-hearted (or should that be mercilessly mocking?) take on the Slashdot approach, with moderators extracting the humour from any and every subject, often in the most tasteless manner possible. Basically a way for its creators to crack a joke about each story before you read it, it nevertheless offers a decent round-up of stories in a variety of topics each day. Daily news with a smirk.