I’ve been following the Digg feed for a few months to keep up with the big news in the tech world. If something important happens, it usually gets Digged, and plenty of other interesting, more esoteric links make it to the top as well. Unfortunately, the site seems to be turning to crap. It seems like more and more right wing and left wing propaganda get Digged enough to make it into the feed lately, even though such content is completely out of bounds for the site. The larger point is that once anything becomes popular enough, the incentives to game the system grow to the point where the gamers basically ruin it for everybody else.
What you wind up with is either total chaos or mass homogenization. Digg seems to be heading toward the “total chaos” phase. It seems like every Web site is sprouting “Digg this” buttons these days, even if the sites don’t cover topics that are relevant to Digg. I’m sure that if you scoured message boards you’d find people exhorting others to go to Digg in droves and add their votes to the burning topic du jour.
Bottom line, I don’t think I’ll be a Digg reader for much longer.
Update: I just read that Jason Calcanis is offering cash to Digg’s most active users to get them to post news at Netscape.com instead. I have many bad things to say about this, but no time to say them.
July 19, 2006 at 5:54 pm
I use reddit more than digg, and I still browse the feed for slashdot. At the end of the day, though, the problem is too many people. The only time I ever ready comments on Slashdot is to waste time. I don’t use any social networking sites, but I’m starting to think that’s what I need, a list of people who have useful links and things to say instead of just anyone. I suppose then I might have a less ‘broad’ set of viewpoints to watch, but I don’t think reading tons of trash works out very well, either.