Marshall McLuhan is famous for the somewhat facile declaration that "the medium is the message". This maxim has been taken a bit too literally (even by McLuhan himself) as people tried to distinguish "hot" and "cold" media. The media were defined by technology. Television was a medium. Print was a medium. Radio was a medium. Fine, that's what people mean by media -- it's the means by which information moves. If you consider something like the OSI Layers of computer networking, it can be pretty dicey to define a layer of media precisely. McLuhan doesn't really account for things like ticker scrolls of print headlines crawling along the bottom of Faux Noose, etc. Is that print or TV? I'd suggest that these are elements of a wider genre. Genres exist within media and, perhaps, the genre is the message.

In this model, the internet is a medium. Fine. But not all the internet is created equal. Comments at CNN are moderated differently than comments at Fox. Comments can be groomed and cultivated for different agendas, but this genre of website has an authoritarian, top-down feel that runs counter to what was supposed to be "fun" about the internet in the Usenet days. People had heard that the internet was a wild west of exciting new ideas and communities. When news entities known from other media began to manipulate the audience commentary, that rumor felt untrue.

Enter the news aggregator. News aggregators established a new genre under different authority? leadership? corporate entity? I suppose its useful to try to define the genre (but I suspect others have done it better -- I'd be interested). The site has a front page, which can be modified. The front page contains threads, which are curated into communities (subreddits, subverses, etc.) These threads contain a title (which is frequently a link), a score, and comments. The mode of interaction is generally to find existing articles, introduce the material with an informative or amusing headline, possibly debate the topic in the comments, and get a score.

It's worth asking what doesn't happen. Although duplicate content in links is frowned upon and links to new pictures are often extolled as OC, news aggregators are not particularly welcoming of new content. And, despite the use of "FTFY", there's not much collaboration in the commentary. It's not a wiki (another genre), which emphasizes building a consensus. There's always some element of confrontation in comments. But we came here for the comments, right? We came here to say what we want, right? Sure and comments can win points, but I think something else is going on.

I think this medium/genre builds upon an existing dissatisfaction with obvious manipulation of userbases. We've all seen astroturfing and excessive moderation. We support free speech and "having our say" -- but we don't write the articles to which we link. We are, oddly, using our humor and debate skills to promote other people's ideas. We're competing to be what we accuse other people of being in heated debates: shills.

I think this problem might be endemic to the "medium". VOAT might reflect us more than Reddit did, but wouldn't that mean we're... choosing an echo chamber? I'm not sure VOAT can be different than Reddit (or Fark, or Dig, or...). It might have a different flavor, but I think it might be the same game...