Did you ever Digg or Stumble or Twitter or Tumble across a juicy lead, only to have the unverified source come back to haunt you later on (whoops, Montauk Monster)? Now there is a news aggregator site that uses an algorithm to determine the credibility of user-submitted stories, which would (in theory) allow commentators to work as their own self-cleaning system of news truthiness; weeding out the more dubious stories by voting them with a low credibility rating. But can Newscred realistically run on a system of fair play?

NewsCred has been in private alpha — not even beta! — testing for a year, and was released to the masses today. But already reviewers are wondering about, well, the credibility of a site than allows any old schmo help determine the accuracy of a story. As Matthew Ingram pointed out;

Credibility is a difficult thing to measure, and it’s not clear whether it’s the kind of thing that a site like NewsCred is going to be able to outsource or generate through an algorithm. If someone clicks the “discredit” button, is it because they don’t like the author? Or because they simply disagree with them, if it’s a blog?

And that's exactly the point. It's almost a given that almost any piece of political commentary on the site, whether from Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, or some random Livejournal, will be voted "credible" or "uncredible" by everyone who agrees or disagrees with their respective views.

Trying to push an algorithm on something as ephemeral as truth is impossible, especially because we're talking about opinions (of which people on the internet have many) instead of something tangible, like fact, which is also maleable.

The algorithm system works for sites like eBay and Amazon because there are hard numbers that correspond with decisions besides personal vendettas; if someone has a low rating on eBay it's not because they said mean things about George Bush. It's because they forgot to ship their damn product.

Marketing a site that combines the persuasive combo of Hard Math with the fickleness of user-generated content is asking to be discredited before launch. But hey, check it out, maybe we're just haters and NewsCred will usher in a new golden age of political discourse and truth. But algorithms are based on math. And math was made to be fuzzy.