Get Your Diggs In
I subscribed to the Digg feed a few weeks ago, and I’d have to agree with Russell Beattie: the wisdom of crowds is rapidly being overwhelmed by foolishness. There’s also an off-putting bias towards Digg-boostering in the frontpage stories. This may play well to the faithful, but non-fanatics like myself aren’t interested in a constant stream of “Digg Rules!” style stories.
So if Yahoo is really buying Digg for $30 million, which I doubt, they’re barking up the wrong tree. They’d do far better to add Digg-like features to del.icio.us, which bases popular picks on the pages people have bookmarked for the own purposes, rather than relying on a hard core of obsessive compulsives to lift choice stories out of obscurity.
Update: Thomas Hawk concludes that the rumored acquisition is a bunch of hot air. I guess I see less value in Digg (at least at present) than Thomas does, since he is still enthusiastic about a potential link up. His long post about improving Yahoo Search by using social software techniques, in which he proposes a Digg acquisition (could this have been the original source of the rumor?) is highly recommended reading, in any case.
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“They’d do far better to add Digg-like features to del.icio.us”
I do not get that at all.
The entire del.icio.us site is just that. Each site is added to the count of the same existing URL
Browse to http://del.icio.us/tags/tweaks and you can see how many people have linked that site or you could say how many others digg that site.
If a link is getting added by many people within x period of time the link becomes popular and is added to the front page of del.icio.us
Comment by Stephen — 1/26/2006 @ 4:19 pm
Yeah, but the popular page has no descriptions, for example. Also, you can’t add comments.
Comment by Matt — 1/26/2006 @ 4:28 pm
Who cares about stupid comments like : Wow great, unbelievable ! Comments makes you lose time.
Comment by buck naked — 1/26/2006 @ 4:34 pm
Agreed that not many people add omments as there is really no need if you have the tag you want and 500 people have added it. Not often do you get a bad site, or in my case anyway.
If you say Yeah but no comments I don’t think the comments are the key success of digg.
Comment by Stephen — 1/26/2006 @ 5:34 pm
I agree that comments are a BIG boost for digg, but not because I like to comment or to read “great, cool, stupid” repeatedly. On digg’s off-frontpage stories the comments somtimes reference related topics and useful info - and they’re easier to read than it is to “interpret” a particular combination of tags on del.icio.us.
Comment by Mike — 1/26/2006 @ 9:04 pm
Yeah, comments are useful. But as I pointed out, they’d be a heck of a lot more useful with a moderation system like Slashdot’s.
Comment by Matt — 1/26/2006 @ 9:13 pm
I have been using del/popular happily for a quite some time.
I started using digg about a month ago because I kept hearing about it.
Here’s my damning faint praise: it’s like slashdot without the smart people and karmic boosterism.
Also, del/popular and digg have a strong overlap, and the feed off del gives me the original link, not the link to the digg page. This sucks less.
I do recommend you check out reddit, though. It has comments, but they’re a subtle feature, and do not dominate the feel of the site.
I’ve been using reddit for about a week, and it’s coverage isn’t as strong as del, but there just aren’t many people using it yet. I really do like the feel of reddit overall.
Comment by Jeremy Dunck — 1/26/2006 @ 10:07 pm
Slashdot’s moderation system is nearly useless. It is an arbitrary filter that only ‘works’ for the first hour or two that a story is up, and even then only if the story itself is interesting enough to get a critical mass of people with mod points to read through the comments. It is *heavily* biased towards the first n comments made on an article, and thereafter a moderator is more likely to increase the moderation on an already-moderated comment than to moderate an unmoderated comment. This is because most users on slashdot view comments at a threashold of around 3, so unmoderated comments are not seen unless a moderator refreshes the page with a lower threshold.
Comment by mwarden — 2/4/2006 @ 9:04 pm