The Rise of Digg.com

An anonymous reader writes "Wired has a story about Digg, a community bookmarking site that creates its own version of the Slashdot effect. It's a provocatively titled piece - 'Digg Just Might Bury Slashdot' - but goes on to consider the obvious similarities between the two and the differences. Digg is more chaotic, immediate and user driven, whereas Slashdot features more in-depth and technical discussions." Well, I hate navel-gazing news but I think the aggregation of blogs is a critical step in the future of on-line content, and Digg is doing good work here. The interesting thing will happen when their population grows a bit more. Scalability is hard... but I imagine the millions of dollars of VC funding will really help.

Comments

I really hate this...

[ColdCoffee]

Why can't both co-exist peacefully without constant 'Slash-Digging' at each other? I like both sites. I check them both quite frequently throughout the day? Can't we all just play nice? There's enough room for both Slashdot AND Digg!!

Re:Late again

[LoganEkz]

Digg.com had this article posted six hours ago.

I'll bite at this.

When did the article make it the main page? It seems that when people refer to when an article was posted, they are talking about when the article was submitted to digg.com, not when it appeared on the digg front page. Even sites such as digg vs dot use the digg article submission time and compare this with when the article appeared on Slashdot.

This is comparing apples vs oranges.

What I would like to see is a comparison of when the digg articles appear on the digg front page vs when they appear on the Slashdot front page.

What I hear form all my non /. friends

[Mr. Cancelled]

Is that Digg gets the articles faster (Well duh... It's completely user/score driven. On /. you have to wait for an editor to post the articles), but also that most of them don't like wading through all the diatribe and arguements in the comments.

Now obviously Digg doesn't have a great comment section, since you can basically only add new message, not keep a thread going, or easily quote/tie your response to a particular comment, but that's not it's thing. That's /.'s thing.

I did find it interesting about how many people have told me that they hate /. for it's users, and the amount of crap you have to dig through in order to get some real info out of the commentary. While I don't mind wading through some crap to find my info, it's been a real eye opener how many people don't care for /.'s nerdy insults and arguments. When i'd mention that with a /. account, you can tailor what types of responses you see when looking at a thread, everyone I mentioned this to came back with a "Why bother? I've got digg now".

So I guess this means that the trolls are doing their thing here on /. (driving people away), and that the common user simply wants to know what's going on in their world. Not to discuss it, or defend their viewpoint against a bunch of Linux hounds, or holyier-than-thou type responses.

Me... I (obviously) still come back to /. for the threads, but I'll be honest in that digg's my 1st stop these days, and when I come to /., it's usually with the thought of "Let's see what /.'s got to say about that digg story I read, if it's even been posted there yet".

To me, the threads are still the "meat and potato's" of /., but I have found myself moderating a lot less since everyone else seems to be wasting their mod points on modding down posts, rather then elevating the good ones above the bad. Maybe /. needs to clean house of some moderators, since they seem to be focusing on what they disagree with, rather than focusing on the strengths which an opposing viewpoint might bring to the table? Just a thought...

Re:Naval Gazing?

[ParadoxDruid]

I come to Slashdot for the comments.

I agree wholeheartedly. I tried Digg, and still get useful links from their sometimes, but it's lacking a soul. There's no community beyond framers and a brazen competition for frontpage stories. There's no interesting discussion of links.

That said, Slashdot could learn a lesson or two from Digg:

• Better integration with other websites.
  Digg's "Blog this" and other tools really allow people with a web presence to link seemlessly with Digg, making it easy on them and reinforcing the popularity of Digg by easily spreading it.
• The "didn't make it" stories
  Often, I find more interesting links in Digg when digging through new links, and ignoring the front-page entirely. Slashdot could have a "stories that didn't make the cut" section, and I'd be very interested.