Ron over at CaveMonkey50 has a great editorial talking about digg and Newsvine. Digg used to be great but right now it is just seen as a group of immature kids that flame and spam everything. Read this article and leave a comment, I think the masses need to hear this one. If only Kevin Rose could read this article and try to stop the corruption of Digg. Anyone that has had an article or something on digg will know what I’m talking about. Diggers won’t even click on the article before giving their negative feedback and reporting it as lame. And apparently they don’t like blogs at all, regardless of content; they think of blogs as just online diaries… quite the contrary.
Somewhere over the past six months Digg has lost its way. Digg is no longer the place to read tech news, it’s the place to find out what’s going on, on the internet. It’s where you go to post the 50th “dupe†comment. It’s the site to vote down the good stories and digg the stories that have nothing but a picture. It’s where you go to argue Mac vs PC or Firefox vs Opera on every single story, whether its relevant or not.
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I have to admit that I share this sentiment. Any time that I may have spent in the past reading articles on Digg, is now spent over at Newsvine reading the quality articles, and not only quality articles, but quality commentary and conversation regarding the articles. Newsvine has definitely hit on something great, I just hope they can maintain it.
I understand the sentiment but it will be interesting to compare the two when Newsvine comes out of private beta. Also, digg’s rumored expanded catagories and threaded comments should bring about major change as well. However, I do feel that digg needs to hurry it up if they wish to keep/bring back their edge.
Interesting read. I agree that digg is very open to user abuse. There’s always some punks that want to ruin it for every one. On the other hand, I do find some great stuff on digg. The notion that digg readers are not very blog friendly is interesting. Come to think of it, you don’t see alot of blogs on the front page. You see some,but not that many. Thanks for the linkage.
Your last point (they think of blogs as just online diaries… quite the contrary.) raises an interesting syntax question. What makes your tech blog a blog, and not just a tech news website?
The software it’s run on? That seems a bizarre classification to make, from a user perspective.
The fact that it’s only you running it? Well, that doesn’t scale to other blogs, does it.
The fact that you are an amateur, and not a professional, in the field/industry? That seems like a likely candidate for the distinction and would presumably go a long way towards explaining the bias. It’s not unsurprising that the average guy would choose a professional over an amateur.
On top of that, consider that the blog content you like can easily come across as noise to other people. For example, I’m still stunned that you (general, not you, Paul) can write anything about Apple and have it linked by a dozen other blogs. And for a lot of people, blogs are synonymous with reblogging – just lists of things you have already read and seen linked in a dozen places.
This leads to major credibility problems. Within a blogging community, there is a defined status thing. People know who the big hitters are, the little guys, and the unknowns. People already know which amateurs have credibility.
But if you aren’t familiar with that, how do you judge people’s authority? A Technorati ranking? Personally, Technorati rankings tell me how many articles about Apple people have written, not whether they are an expert in their field. Technorati ranking is cheaply acquired – just write for the mainstream Internet audience.
There really isn’t any way of knowing, so the easiest thing for people to do is just to go “it’s a blog, therefore it’s amateur, therefore it’s sub-standard; I’ve got no way of knowing any better, therefore I don’t want to know”.
I classify a blog as a site with not only news but with that author’s opinion on the subject at hand while I tend to think of news websites as factual only. The software used to run the site also comes into the definition of it all, but only so much.
You aren’t the only ones that feel this way.
nodiggtheblog.blogspot.com
I only started using Digg a few months back, but ever since I started, I stopped. Ok, so I have a few RSS feeds for different tags, but that’s just to keep up to date with the lesser known things. Roll on December when a friend invited me to Newsvine, and boy, how I was impressed. But deep down, I feel that any site that allows you to comment on user-posted news, will have the fate.
Just my $0.02. ;)
Although Digg has these sort of stories I’m sure Newsvine will also follow that road. Fortunately, Newsvine is not available to the public that’s why Newsvine’s content is way better than Digg’s. Once Newsvine launches and is available to the public I think the same will happen unless Newsvine has some sort of moderation or filtering system.
Digg is pretty nice you coulld find great information.
I agree Digg is not the best. But I like many people cannot make my own decsions about the validity of the articles sentiments because Newsvine is still in beta. I would love to try Newsvine and then maybe I can make up my own mind.
Anybody offering newsvine invites? Mail me at mcgarrygerard /AT\ gmail /DOT\ com. I’d love to try it out.
I have a problem with NewsVine because of their sucky ToS in which you agree to sign over ALL of the content of everything you submit their across time and space – it actually refers to across the universe. Part of what could make NewsVine great is the community approach, but as long as they have that stupid ToS, I can’t use it to it’s full extent.