There’s been a lot of talk about RSSmeme and ReadBurner being democratic; in stark contrast to sites like Techmeme. RSSmeme does absolutely no modifications to what you are sharing (other than URL canonicalization to get rid of duplicates). I will remove stories that have only 1 share if someone emails me complaining that it defames them; if the story has multiple shares I wouldn’t remove it (but that hasn’t happened yet). I think I’ve removed 2 stories so far this way. I also make sure to tell the person that if someone shares it again then it will show up again; I am not trying to control what makes it’s way onto RSSmeme. I will remove someones feed from RSSmeme if they request it (since RSSmeme uses the FriendFeed API to find new feeds).
During my interview for Profy we discussed removing things like LOL cats and comics from RSSmeme; I am absolutely opposed to it. Who’s to say what you start removing next? This is a very slippery slope. During the interview we found out that ReadBurner didn’t have a LOL cat story on it’s homepage that RSSmeme did. I didn’t claim that they were actively filtering these stories out with some sort of blacklist. I just assumed that since RSSmeme and ReadBurner operate on a different set of feeds that it had not bubbled up on their end.
Then this Twitter post showed up in FriendFeed:
How can ReadBurner be democratic if they have some sort of blacklisting going on? Am I getting too riled up over a bunch of cats with captions? What do you think?
Update
Drew says they don’t filter. His Twitter post was in reference to some users complaining that LOL cats were ruining their ReadBurner experience (see here). I’m happy again :)
