Venture Chronicles: Why I'm done with Digg
Sites like Digg were at one time promised (not by Kevin but rather by commentators on “the street”) to be rich information stores that could be mined and presented in many different ways through the efforts of a cottage industry that would spring up in response to the opportunity. Just like RSS readers condensed the process of reading the daily news, in their case feeds, into a single point of contact process, Digg and Techmeme (which I still very much like btw), among others, would offer new ways to discover information relevant to me. Today I realized that far too much crap, which I admit is a subjective measure, is being posted on Digg and I’m just not getting anything out of it anymore. Basically, when the front page features a good number of youtube videos you pretty much have to admit that it’s easier just to go to youtube…
The basic "problem" with Digg, is that it's only as good as the information fed it, and only as interesting as you are in sync with what it's feeding population finds interesting. It is a classic echo chamber.
Some of the recent arguments over the algorithms running digg, where some of the top posters got their knickers in a knot over possibly losing their influence to that of a wider audience, shows the problem of running this kind of place (and a secondary problem, one that I think basically killed slashdot for me, where a group of users decide that the fun part for them is playing the system -- where being a "top digger" is more important than posting "important content" (on slashdot, it's the folks who game the karma system for the same purposes. On any system I'd run, anyone who ever posted a "first post" comment would be immediately banned faster than a WoW geek with a gold farm for the same reason)
This is not to say Digg is broken in any way. But the way these systems are designed, it encourages a narrow point of view based on the interests of that core "top digger" group, and the logistics and politics of the digg process tends to discourage items away from the core interest areas, and that discourages posters that don't tie into that core set of interests, which....
Which means places like Digg are useful and interesting only to the degree that you sync up with their interests. And like Jeff, I recently dropped both Digg and Netscape's RSS feeds because I finally decided the noise wasn't worth the signal for me, and the arguments going on over the digging algorithms made me feel that the top diggers have put themselves above the community as a whole, so that digg has started down the path that both usenet and slashdot have taken, that to very-high-volume irrelevancy...
(or at the very least, not useful to me...)
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