Yahoo! Buzz, a competitor to social news sites like Digg and Reddit, has been opened up to the entire worldwide community.

We've been critical at times of sites like Digg, which are overrun by marketing people and have a secret 'auto-bury' list of sites that aren't tithing properly. It isn't just Digg, Shoutwire and any number of small sites are the same way, but the leader will take the most heat and deservedly so. Sites like ours, that don't need to make money from Digg or artificially pumping up traffic, can take a stand and so we have.

Why? Well, it's social media, not who-pays-to-be-seen media. In a world where only people who pay get to be seen, we could never exist because we're the only large science site not owned by a media corporation or the government. That's the whole point of the Internet - democracy and transparency.

Unlike Digg and a few others, Reddit has mostly been immune to gangs of marketing people pumping up votes because votes don't matter much and few people will read lousy articles on Reddit no matter how many votes they get. The value to artificially pumping up an article on a service like Reddit or Newsvine is negligible.

Marketing experts may gripe that something like Yahoo has editors controlling what gets seen by the masses but plenty of marketing people get their clients on the front page of Slashdot - it just comes down to good content, not votes, and that's as it should be.

Social news needs another big player; someone like Slashdot, in the editor model, or Reddit, in the wide-open model, because more places to be read is good for everyone and a truly democratic social news site is essential.

So if you like something you see here, give it a Buzz. We'll get a button up on the articles pretty soon.