Dugg To Death

This week is sort of Media-Week here at super-struc­ture, where I tell every­one about my per­son­al news filters.

Yeah, and in teh begin­ning, there was Slash­dot, and it was good. News of tech­nol­o­gy flowed from the mouths of geeks and they were hap­py in their green light. Then came forth the trolls and the fan­boys and the hax0rs and they did mul­ti­ply. They spoke of St. Jobs and cas­ti­gat­ed the demon Gates. They ques­tioned the run­ning of Lin­ux on any­thing with elec­tric­i­ty and of the abil­i­ty to make toast. They quot­ed scrip­ture includ­ing “first post!” and “All your base are belong to us.” And so, the use­ful­ness of the /. did dimin­ish with time. Thus came the the WebT­wo­PointOh-ites from the land of TechTV to lead the flock to the new promised land: Digg. The site flour­ished with vast dai­ly links until the trolls and fan­boys did seek destroy it as well. Alas, a dark­ness did fall upon the screen…

For the over three months now, I’ve been using the Web2.0 dar­ling tech news site, Digg.com. I have to give it’s cre­ators cred­it for cre­at­ing one of the fastest news sites in the world, both in terms of growth speed as well as how quick­ly news dis­sem­i­nates through it. The most often com­par­i­son made with Digg is to that of Slash­dot, the much more ven­er­a­ble and mod­er­at­ed tech news site. I’ll spare you com­par­ing the two too much fur­ther, but a lit­tle back­ground is in order.

Same News, Different Address

Nom­i­nal­ly, they cov­er the same mate­r­i­al and any link that finds it’s way to the top of one is sure to make it to the oth­er with­in hours, if not min­utes. Jason Kot­tke, the blog­ger every­one loves to say they don’t read but real­ly do, wrote a great com­par­i­son on one of his arti­cles get­ting the after-effect of both Digg and Slash­dot post­ings: insane amounts of traf­fic. He goes into quite a bit of detail on what the Slashdot/Digg effect is like for both sites, but here’s a sum­ma­ry: The Digg Effect is a sharp and skin­ny spike in traf­fic while the Slash­dot Effect is a longer wave, with greater total traf­fic. He even fol­lowed up when that sto­ry got post­ed on Digg. His posts fol­low more about the vol­ume of the two sites, but he does dis­cuss briefly their use­ful­ness as news tools.

Where Slash­dot is like some exclu­sive geek club with rules and struc­ture, Digg is con­trolled by the mass­es and any­thing goes. If that sounds like Anar­chy, well, it’s pret­ty close. I decid­ed a long time ago that Slash­dot held lit­tle of my inter­est. I found the con­ver­sa­tions to be long and bor­ing at best and rude and spite­ful at worst. Fur­ther, usu­al­ly only a cou­ple of arti­cles a day seemed to be worth me click­ing on. When I start­ed using Digg reg­u­lar­ly, I found that the user-sub­mit­ted arti­cles had such mis­lead­ing titles and descrip­tions, I almost always had to click on them to get any idea of whether the arti­cle was worth my time or not. As a news fil­ter, it seemed to do me lit­tle good. As Jason Kot­tke describes it:

[Digg]‘s too much of an infor­ma­tion­al fire­hose. Blog­gers and Slash­dot sto­ry sub­mit­ters might like drink­ing from that hose, but there’s just too much flow (and not enough edit­ing) to make it an every­day, long-term source of information.

Fire­hose is exact­ly right. I might as well just do a per­pet­u­al Google search on “Tech”, as I’d get near­ly as use­ful a filter.

Audience Participation

Slash­dot is more sim­i­lar to a tech vari­ety show with some audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion. It’s a mul­ti-authored, dai­ly link list that allows vast amounts of con­ver­sa­tion with­in mod­er­at­ed, and more impor­tant­ly, thread­ed dis­cus­sions. Just in case it’s not entire­ly obvi­ous, let me explain: thread­ed dis­cus­sions, unlike this site or Digg.com, allow for sub-top­ics to stick togeth­er and have some hier­ar­chi­cal asso­ci­a­tion. In a stan­dard com­ment list, such as at Digg, all con­ver­sa­tions are just lumped in a room togeth­er with no way to tie them back togeth­er. Also, what Digg does­n’t have is mod­er­a­tion. User’s have the abil­i­ty score a com­ment and set a score thresh­old to com­ments they wish to view, but so few users take advan­tage of this as to ren­der it use­less. Even the crud­est flames (and oh boy, you have no idea until you’ve actu­al­ly read them) typ­i­cal­ly go com­plete­ly unmarked, and users who tru­ly try and pro­vide insight, addi­tion­al infor­ma­tion, or bet­ter links go equal­ly unnoticed.

Now, the real­ly inno­v­a­tive fea­ture of Digg.com is the fact that user’s can give any sto­ry a “Thum­b’s Up” if the sto­ry is news-wor­thy (well, that’s how it’s sup­posed to work). You can then also report a sto­ry (spam, old news, just plain lame, etc.) to give it the “Thum­b’s Down.” I think hav­ing cat­e­gories for the “Thum­b’s Up” option would­n’t have been a bad fea­ture, either. That is, are you “dig­ging” the sto­ry because you agree, think it’s impor­tant infor­ma­tion, or think a handy link, etc. How­ev­er, that’s real­ly the least of my com­plaints against Digg.

A lot of peo­ple accuse the main­stream media of hav­ing a bias to this, that, or the oth­er. I think their main bias is towards mon­ey, and how to make more of it. Slash­dot has it’s own bias­es: very pro sci­ence and anti-Microsoft for starters. How­ev­er, Digg has the sen­sa­tion­al bug and a extreme­ly short atten­tion span to go with it. These two make for a dan­ger­ous and mob-like men­tal­i­ty. Take the Price-Rite-Pho­to sto­ry, which made Digg part of the sto­ry. Sim­i­lar sub­jects that have got­ten out of hand have been han­dled bet­ter, but it shows just how quick to react Digg users can be. Just ask Steve Mail­let, who got accused of steal­ing Dig­g’s code for a cou­ple of his own sites. I felt Mr. Mail­let had done noth­ing wrong, but try telling that to the rag­ing mass­es. This only degrades the use­ful­ness of Digg even fur­ther: the wis­dom of the crowd is watered down to the low­est com­mon denominator.

Tomor­row, I’ll show you a great new site that I think solves a lot of the issues that I have with these two news sites.

Published
Categorized as Geek

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

3 comments

  1. Man, I could take this top­ic and run for hours. Okay, min­utes. How­ev­er, I have some cook­ing to do so I won’t type long.

    I’ve always loved Slash­dot — I’ve loved it so long that I have a 5‑digit user ID. Not King Dork, but still not bad. I joined well before the year 2000.

    Late­ly, in the past year or year-and-a-half, I’ve felt the Slash­dot qual­i­ty decline. I’ve had to set my Com­ment Score thresh­old at 3, and some­times I even up it to 4. There are ENTIRELY too many ter­ri­ble use­less com­ments on that site. As a result I read less of the com­ments than I used to, but I still read the com­ments for a sto­ry in which I am inter­est­ed. Some­times when I see the head­line in my RSS aggre­ga­tor (more on that in a sec­ond) I’ll open the sto­ry just for the comments.

    Digg and I don’t go far back at all — maybe just a few weeks. I was imme­di­ate­ly attract­ed to it and then almost instant­ly repulsed. Every­thing I want­ed — com­ment mod­er­a­tion, thread­ed con­ver­sa­tions, “intel­li­gent” dis­cus­sion — NOT PRESENT. Okay, yeah, there is mod­er­a­tion but as you said no one tru­ly uses it. The fire­hose anal­o­gy is indeed apt — there’s a ton of inter­est­ing stuff out there but god for­bid you dare scroll down to the com­ments sec­tion. On Slash­dot there are entire­ly too many use­less com­ments. On Digg there is NOTHING BUT USELESS COMMENTS. EVER.

    How­ev­er, I nev­er vis­it either of these sites direct­ly. They both just pop up in my news­read­er as head­lines. If the head­line is inter­est­ing I’ll open the link, often times not car­ing if it’s Slash­dot or Digg (or Engad­get or TUAW or what­ev­er else dorky tech site is in my ‘Pseu­do-news’ group). Then once the site is loaded the appro­pri­ate action — read­ing com­ments or des­per­ate­ly ignor­ing them — is taken.

    I think I added noth­ing to this conversation.

  2. Though I DID just have the stu­pid­ly awe­some idea that Digg users should not actu­al­ly be able to Digg a sto­ry until they have actu­al­ly clicked on the sto­ry link. That might help ‘head­line dig­ging’ or what­ev­er they call it.

  3. I think you could have eas­i­ly cre­at­ed your own post on this. You said it just as well as I did, if not bet­ter. I think that I might not have stressed this enough: Digg com­ments are 99.99% com­plete­ly a waste of time. Slash­dot at least seems to fol­low the 90% crap rule a lit­tle better.

    I use an RSS read­er as well, and I nev­er added Digg just because of the “Fire­hose” effect; I just did­n’t want to over­flow my whole read­er with crap head­lines I knew I’d only care about 1/100 of. I feel this helps my obses­sion with try­ing to raise the lev­el of dis­cus­sion on the inter­net in that it keeps me off of those sites as much as possible.

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