Why Does Digg Still Exist? (RANT)

well I guess its all down to the quality of the community and its going to find its level, just like forums and all other comunity sites do.....

I do dispair at Digg at times. I can't stand Slashdot because of the comments, and Digg seems to be going the same way.
There are moronic stories posted, and greater numbers of morons digging them and leaving moronic comments about them in many cases.

Saw an article the other day that people were commenting on, saying they weren't going to digg it because it didn't have pictures?! Seems stories need to be in comic book format!

I do have Digg in my feedreader, but I must skim over at least 70% of what is posted there, all the Web2.0 fanboy stuff gets instantly ignored, and there's some other pretty basic stuff that crops up that people go nuts over.

In amoungst it all, I do find some fairly cool stuff as well though, but I'm already at the point where I only read about the first 3 comments to see if it's been flamed as a hoax.

...but I'm going to digg it anyway and see what happens.

I just don't like the terminology; it's so smug and utterly lame.

scott karp at publishing2.com has a great post on why digg kinda sucks.

And that’s why I find community filters like Digg and Reddit so useless. If you have a random group of people act as a filter, you’re going to get a random result.

and....

The collective intelligence of some groups of people is more intelligent than that of other groups. Why? Because on certain topics, and in general, some people are smarter than others.

i think that pretty much hits the spot in terms of where the problem lies. the citizen journalism stuff is great, but you need smart citizens who know the niche their talking about -- not random groups of people, many of whom have ulterior motives not related to creating quality journalism.

Half a minute to load that story. That's why I personally don't like Digg.

A lot of icing, but so little cake.

... a random group of people ...

AKA: "GIGO" - garbage in, garbage out.

That is why the description "like Digg" (or even Web 2.0) is the kiss of death to me - I generally will not even take a look at it. Slashdot at least has editors introducing topics which helps, but then things start going wrong within the second reply - IMO.

The problem with the Digg type sites is that large crowds don't organize themselves of their own accord. They either disperse or become mobs. Organization requires active leadership.

I still don't see any of this as being better than a well run forum (emphasis on well run.) You need to have mods that not only actively seed the discussions but also keep threads on topic without becoming too heavy handed.

Obviously Digg still exists because people enjoy the site and visit it frequently. People seem to enjoy having pointless arguments about whether PS3 or XBox 360 is better; whether Apple is better than Microsoft. Even MORE people seem to enjoy criticizing the people having pointless arguments.

I like Digg not to learn about technology related issues but to get a sense for how the masses are interpreting what's important--however trivial their views might be. If occassionally I actually find something new and valuable on Digg all the better.

Collaborative filtering has its place--but I don't think it is the holy grail. I'm still waiting for a site that combines intelligent editors, sophisticated personalization, and smart collaborative filtering (predicting items I'll enjoy based on others computed to have similar tastes). Toss in a good comment rating system and you'd have the perfect news site.

I think you are missing the point, if Digg sucks it is because its user base sucks. Yet, I wouldn't go that far, you get lame digs, but there are some good finds there too. BTW, Digg could be a great source of traffic.

So?

Digg exists because a certain demographic of our society enjoys it. The same reason Threadwatch exists or that bodybuilding site that talks about illegal supplements. They have a strong, loyal following and have created a nice niche on the web. They continue to grow weekly. Knock the diggs all you want, but that audience wants to see those type of articles and they have created their own space on the web.

As for the technical issues, I believe a lot of it stems to their initial setup. From my understanding, they had to re-write a lot of things due to not figuring how popular the site would get one day. Since they have some VC money behind them, I'm sure they'll figure those issues out.