An interesting article discusses the problem in the reddit community that the community has wide agreement on a variety of issues, and that therefore only articles with the "correct" viewpoint on those issues get many votes. (Similar problems apply to the other social news sites like slashdot and digg.)
The off-the-cuff response from the recommender community might be "let's solve the problem by creating personalized reddit". In this world, everyone would read the articles he or she was most interested in, creating many overlapping communities of interest. A concern with this approach is that social psychology suggests that by making it easy for people to only talk with others with whom they agree, we would be creating a world that would emphasize our differences, amplifying them over time, balkanizing the community of news readers. For instance, all of the atheists would only read articles that support their views, and would become increasingly resistant to theist views — and eventually unable to even find common ground for discussion with theists.
An alternative would be to find a way to create a community news reader that would simultaneously support personalization and encourage the sharing of opinions. What would such a news reader look like? How would it use recommenders in a novel way?
