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

My comparison

[DeadSea]

I have been reading slashdot for years and digg for months. I don't ever see one replacing the other. Some people will like one, some will like the other, but many will like both. Here is my comparison:

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.

Re:A Critical Difference

[mcho]

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'.)

Re:Naval Gazing?

[Flaming Babies]

I've been to Digg, and their stories are much more current than Slashdot's (seemingly because of the way stories are posted)

I, myself, have not been to Digg...
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?

Re:Naval Gazing?

[Liselle]

But then it would be slashdot - what would be the point?

It would be Slashdot without the editors. I think that would be interesting to see, if nothing else.

Re:Naval Gazing?

[fyngyrz]

To be blunt, I think that the reason that taco hates nav(e|a)l gazing is because there is so much that needs improvement.

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.

Re:Naval Gazing?

[Bogtha]

I'm surprised, though, that a troll community hasn't been fostered that gets foul image sites permanantly at the top. Maybe they have a method of preventing that, I don't know that much about it.

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.

I'd like to see Digg with a better commenting system and some form of user-moderation of posts: right now it resembles graffiti on the wall, not discussion.

But then it would be slashdot - what would be the point?

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.