… the AP and all the major newspapers would be obliged to report on stories they’d otherwise never acknowledge in print. Digg never really had that problem, as the front page reflected the same biases as would the front page of the New York times and all the other major players in print.

Amplify… I just don’t know what that one was about. There are others, but it seems as though the invisible hand at work here has an agenda all its own, and it seems to me the primary motive is either to eliminate these sites that put out endless millions of pages of UGC, and/or it’s part of a coordinated effort to remove the ability from regular people to create news, leaving it up to the editors who feel they have a God-given right to determine for everyone what news should be shown to the public and what should be hidden from view.

Anyway, that’s my two cents. Call it conspiratorial if you will. I know not how else to explain the deliberate burning of money.

And I don’t buy that there was no money in those sites. Based on the returns I’ve been seeing from Facebook advertising, I definitely see value in the content and users – for advertising if nothing else, but there’s definitely value there. This is the main reason I cannot accept the stated reasoning for these buyouts for no reason other than to shut down popular sites with millions of users.

Personally, I think the big player in search is involved somehow in some way or another. Be it setting up shell companies to buy out these wildly popular voting sites only to shut them down as a means of reducing the amount of content it must index or for some other purpose.

Mixx may have been shut down because the culture was not conducive to mass media burying important stories. Once they’d hit the front page of Mixx, ma\\\\