Bradley Horowitz writes a bit on Flickr's interestingness. While Findory's Greg Linden focuses on "getting the crap out", Horowitz notes that Flickr embraces the junk:
“So Flickr is a system that accommodates taking a ‘worthless’ picture of a hangnail, or a breathtaking Ansel Adams-like landscape. The cool thing is that while creating a frictionless environment that serves both scenarios, we can also determine which of the two is likely more ‘interesting’ to the community at large.”Of course this is a false dichotomy as Findory attempts to surface personalized interesting bits too and does it with a lot less user information than Flickr. Either way I'm more and more convinced that for systems at Web scale, the real problems involve dealing with noise, which neatly captures cheaters, morons, and minimal information.