Social content sites have really grown recently and the top ones get a significant volume of web visitors on a daily basis. Odds are, if you are a regular reader of OnStartups.com you found this site originally through one of the social content sites like digg, reddit or Netscape. I'm a regular user of both digg and reddit and have submitted, voted and read articles on both sites on a relatively regular basis. I met the founders of reddit when they first announced their product/company in Cambridge, MA and have been following the company ever since. I really only have one major issue with the social content sites out there right now. The content sucks. Though this may seem like a relatively strong statement to make, I'm confident that if you visited any of these sites right now and looked at the top 5-10 stories/links, you'd find that the noise to signal ratio is really, really high. There's a reason for this. Most of these sites are not really designed for you. If you're like me (and chances are you're more like me than you are the average digg user), and you took a critical look at the content on digg.com at any given time, you'd find the relevancy pretty low. So, why does the most popular social content site on the Internet have content that sucks? Clearly, the whole point of the site is that the content should not suck. The reason is very simple: The content is really not focused on you or your needs. It's not meant to be. It's meant to rank the most popular content based on the opinion of a bunch of random people you don't know or care about whereas what you're probably really interested in is content based on the opinion of a very small number of people you do care about. These are the people with whom you share some interests and or/or have some respect for. Digg has categories (and sub-categories), but that doesn't really help. The content that gets submitted in the first place (and then gets voted on) is primarily a function of the user-base and the user-base is broad and diffuse. My co-founder at HubSpot wrote on an article on this very topic a little while ago. The title of the article is "
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