With all the talk of Digg, its top user and our own inability to make appearances on the site — thanks to a wicked ban from the Digg folks — I figured it was about time to talk about social media’s long term viability. With more and more bloggers — and even larger PR firms — reaching out to Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon (the “big three”) it’s hard to figure out if all the attention is anything more than a small, yet very vocal, community tooting its own horn. Adam Singer brought up social networking the other day on Future Buzz. He offers up this opinion:

Most marketers would be lucky to have their campaign succeed in spreading on these networks, most bloggers are ecstatic when something they’ve written makes page one, most reporters are buzzing when something they publish hits page one and most artists would love to have something they created on page one — in all cases, getting there is the result of doing something exceptionally cool.

Sure, getting to the top of Digg and Reddit has a lot to do with ingenuity and novelty, but it has even more to do with luck and — like every other business in the world — who you know. As made perfectly clear in our recent interview with Digg’s top user, it comes down to a network of top users who “look out for each others submissions.” It’s the smoke-filled room all over again. When a handful of users can manipulate the system within an acceptable margin of failure, you start to see cracks in social media’s rise-to-fame claim. Social media isn’t so social after all. If you extrapolate the situation out over time, the content of Digg has the potential to turn into Saturday afternoon television — advertising in the form of content. Infomercials! Food dehydrators and that shouting guy with the orange cleaner. Is this the way of the future though? Will social networking sites react fast enough to keep up with the public’s amazing adaptability and speed for discovering manipulation? In this humble blogger’s opinion, one community is — and it’s sure as soup not Digg. Let me pause a moment for full disclosure. I’m a Reddit user. I browse it once or twice a day, comment sporadically and often vote things down rather than up. (I also use Stumble Upon, but because its community is hidden and the toolbar is so simple and somewhat disconnected from community, it stands in a class of its own.) That being said, Reddit is the future. And it’s the future for one reason: open source. When Reddit opened up its code for all to see, it changed the social media game. As Read Write Web put it:

It makes sense for Reddit, which has grown because of very passionate and technically savvy community, might go this route. Open sourcing Reddit’s code will very likely lead to a stronger product and tighter community, and not to the birth of strong competitors.

Point made. Reddit allowed its small (compared to Digg), but fanatic and incredibly tech literate community to develop its own future. The Reddit community is literally in charge of how the site develops, both at Reddit.com and everywhere else. Sure, the Reddit crew still runs the site, but the community can shape its future and its features. In other words, no one needs to manipulate the system. They can already change it however they see fit. But that wasn’t the end. A few weeks ago, Reddit made it even easier for non-geeks to host reddits on their own domain. The subreddit system was expanded and folks from all over started making reddits to host both at Reddit and at their own domains. (This is the second large boom in subreddits, which first expanded about six months back to only moderate success.) More interesting than new ethnic food reddits was larger companies jumping on the Reddit bandwagon. For instance, Oregon Live, the Internet home of the Oregonian — Portland, Oregon’s paper of record — recently added their own oregon-centric subreddit hosted on their site. And while the Oregon reddit is a little sparse right now, the idea of local reddits hosted anywhere is the type of open source advancement that will keep Reddit rolling into the future. The key to Reddit’s success then will be counter-intuitive. Digg boasts of all its users but the community has only so many ways to develop and a few smart, lucky individuals can struggle for all the power. Reddit might face the same problems at Reddit.com, but because it spread its seed out over the entire World Wide Web (The entire thing!), users can form communities anywhere, for any subject. And, they don’t even have to thank Reddit if they don’t want to. But we know. We know.