Social Media Needs a Formal Topic Hierarchy

I have analyzed how the blog restricts discussion, how a discussion forum and something like the original USENET is a much better way to hold a discussion on-line than any blog.

But there is another element which gets to the keystone of social media theory in its anthesis. It is the stupidity of crowds, and the failure of the ad hoc social promotion of topics.

Reddit and Slashdot have many of the discussion features the rest of social media needs, the use of Markdown format at least inside a textarea. That should be adopted as a standard for all blog software. But Reddit especially suffers from a useful structure. The top-most breakdown of topics is too broad to be useful and the subreddit is too specific and not intuitive enough.

There needs to be topic hierarchy. And it must be orderly. There is another lie in social media that some orderly structure of knowledge is not needed, it is. There is a reason knowledge is broken down into sections. It is because the structure can be taught and it has some logic. That is lacking from sites like Reddit and Slashdot who are otherwise tending to discussion forums. Even if the flash-in-the-pan structure is useful to topical "hot", read impressionistic topics, a relative static topic structure should exist along side. This change and discussion forum features in blogs would go a long way to repairing the failings of Social Media as a medium for discussion.