Social bookmarking sites are websites wherein people who share the same interests can store, organize and discover their favorite web pages. Once people bookmark their favorites, the members of their network will be able to view the ‘fave list’ and can visit the pages which the member bookmarked. If the discovered sites/bookmarked sites are considered interesting by the other people, they can then vote for the site, and the site gets more and more visits.

The “Crash” of Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is (or should I say, was) a great way of sharing interesting finds with your friends. But now, do the number of votes still count in terms of knowing if the site is really good or not?These days, some webmasters are starting to abuse social news and social bookmarking sites. They pay people to give their web pages a “thumbs up” or a vote. That is ridiculous, as it is like cheating the system of social sites. Their sites are getting votes not because people like their sites, but because they paid others to get more votes!

There are also some webmasters who exchange votes with each other, and I admit that I was once one of them… and because of the massive number of those webmasters, some people even thought of making a website wherein trading of votes can take place! That is so absurd! The integrity of the social bookmarking system is starting to fall apart because of the “unethical” things that the webmasters are doing nowadays.

Something Must be Done!

Due to the fishy things that are going around right now, I believe that there will come a day when the social bookmarking sites will be filled with sites which have been brought to the spotlight by paid voters. When this happens, people (not webmasters) will no longer use social bookmarking sites to store and share their favorites because of the “biased” voting system.

As I said, a lot of webmasters are participating in certain vote exchange, selling and buying schemes.

They are destroying the social bookmarking sites like a tractor demolishing a building! It will be hard to stop them since vote buying and trading is becoming a fancy trend in certain webmaster discussion boards. I guess that all we can do now is to stop doing these things (if you are) and let all of your webmaster friends realize that social bookmarking might die if they continue doing those “unethical things”.

As days go by, social bookmarking will either stay as the “in” thing or pass away with time, and it is our choice if we want it to stay or to go away!

Let me know if you have an idea on how to stop the downfall of social bookmarking sites by commenting on this post. Feel free state your own point of view in this issue by leaving a comment.

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Seven Sites to Submit Your Articles To
• How to Generate REAL Traffic from StumbleUpon
• 10 Great Reasons to Use Sphinn