Small groups of true believers are common in social movements. This is neither new nor sinister. The founders of the USA were an influential small group.
No one's disputing that. What's broken about the naive implementation of social news is the degree to which a small group of true believers can take it over.
You'll have seen this before with Lisp on Reddit. Some people always upvote, some people always downvote, some people downvote because they're tired of seeing it, and the vast, vast majority simply have no opinion. To them, the words "Lisp" and "pebble" have identical emotional affect. So consequently a small core of Lispers can flood the front page, or, as the ratio of fans to bashers shifts, they can be crowded into obscurity even on the programming page. The small group leads the large group because, in regard of that topic, the large group is as happy with as without.
That "small group leading" effect is what makes any-to-many media such a ferment of ideas. Suppose you used an algorithm that refused to raise articles with less than mainstream interest. You'd end up duplicating the banality of broadcast TV, which also relies on broad and shallow appeal. There's a reason the slang calls it the "lowest common denominator"!
