Slashdot Mirror
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.
Editorial:
Slashdot: Targeted by very technical editors, I generally want to hear about 40% of the stories.
Digg: Targeted by users, I generally want to hear about 5% of the stories.
Comments:
Slashdot: Best comment system I've seen with a large number of commenters (threshold 4 for me)
Digg: Comments are worthless.
Timeliness:
Slashdot: Stories are often days old (and duplicates abound).
Digg: Generally havn't seen it before.
RSS:
Slashdot: As a subscriber, I get a full customized rss feed with some unexpected plums (see my latest journal entry)
Digg: The RSS feed doesn't contain the link to the story, forcing you to go to their useless comments page.
I disagree with the comment that traffic has real value.
As a web site owner, traffic from /. doesn't necessarily translate into new customers, increase ad revenue, etc. And, ironically, this has been discussed on digg.com.
(Of course this comment won't see the light of day because if you don't post early, you're comments aren't moderated any higher to 'Nothing to See Here, Move On'.)
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Just curious if you saw the http://diggvsdot.com/ link in the story?
I've heard many times here that Digg comes out with stories faster...this seems to disagree.
Is this bad data?
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As far as Digg.com taking over goes, I'm in total aggrement with the Grandparent. You don't get any sort of intellectual discussion there like you do here (of course, using the comment threshold to its full advantage ;) ), but I don't think that's the point of Digg.com.
There is a way to report duplicates, spam, lame, or broken links on Digg.com but I haven't noticed any difference when I use that because I like to see the latest instead of waiting a week until a story hits the front page. I suppose the editors wait until a certain amount of complaints come in until they do something. It seems to work over all because few duplicate stories make it to the front page.
Personally, I keep an eye on both sites.
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I too come for the comments. There are some real gems. Quite often, they've been modded into oblivion by some idiot who ( inexplicably) has mod points. That's why I don't read slashdot at +4; slashdot's moderation, to be blunt, doesn't work. Because it is so often punitive and/or ideologically driven, it makes no sense to trust it to limit what you read; and because it is anonymous, there is no ability for the community to rein in such abuses. Add to this the fact that meta-moderation simply doesn't work, as evidenced by the fact that slashdot's primary moderation is just as broken today as it was years back.
Step it up a level: It'd sure be nice if everyone who "edits" the stories had decent English skills. For instance, yesterday, in a story entitled "Smart hotels in New York City", the following nugget creeps, steaming and raw, into the reader's eye: "People will use computing as natural as they use writing instruments." Errors like that appear almost every day, putting the lie to the very idea that there are "editors" at work. People are approving stories, certainly, but at least one of them is not "editing" them. I find it a little sad that a site which claims to serve a technically inclined audience can't be bothered with the technical details of writing, even to the point of the truly minor and/or obvious. Naval, indeed.
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My guess would be that Slashdot are vulnerable to trolls and Digg are not because Slashdot has Broken Windows.
Slashdot exhibits a lot of broken behaviour - dupes, typos, bad grammar, entire words missing from sentences, obvious astroturfing/paid-for stories, front-page stories linking to Goatse pages, etc. Most of this can be explained by editors who can't or won't do a good job. This both attracts people who take advantage of that, drives away people who care about that, and frustrates the people who end up staying for the comments.
Digg doesn't exhibit the same systematic, long-term failures of Slashdot, so it's less likely to attract vandals and malcontents.
It wouldn't be Slashdot until it added all the problems listed above. Digg with better comments would be like Slashdot with those problems fixed. And since the Slashdot editors obviously don't want to fix Slashdot, it's up to somebody else like Digg to take over.
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For this *particular* story, the story on digg only appeared after it appeared on slashdot.
However, being a long time reader of both digg and Slashdot, I find that links to stories which appear on Slashdot nowadays invariably have appeared on Digg's front page up to 2 days earlier. More, sometimes. Slashdot is not the place to go for up-to-the-minute articles.
My alternative theory is that the majority of Slashdot submissions are now coming from people who found the articles they're submitting from seeing them on digg.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I go to /. to read (and occasionally comment) on selected technical topics. The topic choice is predetermined, some I like, some I pass, many topics I'd like to see may never surface. Regardless, there is always a debate, some flaming and sometimes some laughs. Its all about the comments. I no longer look to /. for late breaking news, its invariably delayed or some news/topics never show up. Its all about the discussion...
/. concept (I am patient, I expect I will have to wait a while...).
I go to digg to get late breaking news, book mark my areas of interest (I invariably want to find an article again later) and "dig" for new information via users with related links. Digg's comments are mostly worthless dribble but I do not look for comment value on Digg.
Digg seems to be evolving (and hopefully improving their scalability). I hope to see some innovation on the proven