Time for a New Digg
Posted by Trejkaz Mon, 01 May 2006 00:11:00 GMT
It occurs to me that now I have a laptop, I finally have a solution for keeping my work and home RSS feeds in sync – use the same computer for both.
So I was just cleaning up my RSS feeds (and Atom, of course, which is cooler) imported over from work, basically putting similar sites grouped together in folders so that there aren’t so many groups to click on. And it seems that in the same time a site like Slashdot or Engadget takes to get 20 stories (of which perhaps 10 are worth reading), Digg manages to amass about 200 stories (of which perhaps 10 are worth reading.)
Digg was actually quite good when I first subscribed to its RSS feed. But it seems that the longer it sticks around, the easier it is for a piece of absolute dogshit to get to the front page. These days, it seems like it’s more of an extension to del.icio.us, only with a bunch of opinionated bullshit tagged under the story title.
I guess it has something to do with moderation being completely controlled by the community. As a site amasses more users, it amasses more idiots, and these idiots digg the wrong stories. There becomes a point where there are enough idiots that if they all clicked on a bad story, the bad story instantly makes it to the front.
So as a result of the crapflood, I’ve had to move Digg out of the “News” group into a new category which for now I’m calling “Link Flood”. So I guess I can resort to that category when there is absolutely nothing else to read.
(While I’m on this topic, I’ve started to wonder why I still subscribe to Engadget. Their comment system clearly no longer wants me to make comments, because their validation emails don’t ever arrive. And their staff never answer my questions when I ask why they’re not sending the validation emails anymore. Perhaps my email address has made it onto a spam list somewhere, I have no idea.)
So in any case, I think it’s time for Digg to either reinvent itself, or for someone to start a new alternative. Perhaps something like Advogato where the people who rate the worth of each other, only apply it to the news submissions so that people who are worth jack shit don’t get their stories on the front page so easily.
Any takers?