A social news website is a type of website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

 that features user-submitted stories that are ranked based on popularity.

Slashdot

Slashdot

Slashdot

Slashdot is a technology-related news website owned by Geeknet, Inc. The site, which bills itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters", features user-submitted and ‑evaluated current affairs news stories about science- and technology-related topics. Each story has a comments section...

, started in 1997, was one of the first social news websites. It focuses mainly on science and technology related news. Users can submit stories, and the editors pick out the best stories each day for the front page. Users can then post comments on the stories.

Fark

Fark

Fark

Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. As of June 2009, the site boasts approximately four million unique visitors per month, which puts it among the top 100 English language websites...

 was started in 1997, and featured news of any topic. On Fark, users can submit articles to the administrators of the site. Each day, these administrators pick out 50 articles to display on the front page.

Digg

Digg

Digg

Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...

, launched in December 2004, introduced the voting system. This system allows users to "digg" or "bury" articles. "Digging" is the equivalent of voting positively, so that popular articles are displayed first. "Burying" does not lower an articles score. However, if an article is buried enough times, it will be automatically deleted.

Reddit

Reddit

Reddit

reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page.Reddit was originally...

is another social news site where users can vote on articles and comments. Unlike Digg, users can directly affect the article's score. An "upvote" will increase the score and a "downvote" will decrease it. Articles with the highest scores will be displayed on the front page. There is also a page for "controversial" articles, that have an almost equal number of upvotes and downvotes. Reddit also introduced a system of user-created communities called "subreddits," which are essentially categories for a specific type of news.

Features

All social news websites allow the users to submit the content in some way. Each site differs in how the content is moderated. On Slashdot and Fark, for example, the administrators of the site decide which articles make it to the front page. On Reddit and Digg, the articles that get the most votes from the community will make it to the front page.

Many social news websites also feature a comment system, where users can form a discussion based on each article. Some of these sites have also applied their voting system to the comments, so that the most popular comments are displayed first.