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.

Naval Gazing?

CmdrTaco, I like the Navy as much as anyone else, but I don't see how looking at sailors has anything to do with Slashdot or Digg. Oh, you meant "navel gazing". Well, some of us like to talk about the site, though, can we get a topic for it? Maybe? The icon could be a battleship. :D

So anyway, we finally have a story where Digg.com rants are not offtopic. Well, I'll fire the opening salvo: I've been to Digg, and their stories are much more current than Slashdot's (seemingly because of the way stories are posted), but the comment system is a steaming pile. There is no threading (seriously hard to follow conversations without threading). And, despite Slashdot's flawed moderation system, scanning article comments at +4 is usually a pleasant experience, and I can't find that kind of functionality on Digg as an anonymous reader.

I come to Slashdot for the comments. Not for the editor abuses, the typos, the political slant, the "last week" news, blah blah etc. I know I am not alone in this. It seems to me that Slashdot and Digg are both filling a different niche at the moment. 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.

Any Digg cheerleaders out there with some positive things to add about the comment system that I missed in my ignorance?

Re:Naval Gazing?

Big deal.

Re:Naval Gazing?

Any Digg cheerleaders out there with some positive things to add about the comment system that I missed in my ignorance?

Not a cheerleader, but a user of both sites, so here goes:

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

Right on both points. They don't have lazy editors to get in the way between a good story and the readers. A truly democratic method. 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.

but the comment system is a steaming pile. There is no threading (seriously hard to follow conversations without threading). And, despite Slashdot's flawed moderation system, scanning article comments at +4 is usually a pleasant experience, and I can't find that kind of functionality on Digg as an anonymous reader.

Comments aren't digg's focus. The stories are. You'll get some commentary on the story, but that's about it. And I think there's some simplistic beauty in that - the goal there isn't to get an off-topic discussion going, it's to provide a simple mechanism for commenting *on the story.* So threads aren't really needed. This doesn't mean they're better or worse than /., just different.

I come to Slashdot for the comments. Not for the editor abuses, the typos, the political slant, the "last week" news, blah blah etc. I know I am not alone in this. It seems to me that Slashdot and Digg are both filling a different niche at the moment.

Precisely.

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?

Re:Naval Gazing?

I know a lot of people here hate the word, but that makes Digg sound an awful lot like a blog...

Yup; from what I've seen, Digg reads pretty much like a typical web-forum/blogg/whatever; stories can be rated so that people know what's most popular (most web forums just show the most recently posted story first, which actually does tend to keep them in "popularity order", but less explicitly).

The comments I read were mostly the completely random pointless crap you tend to get on most web forums. They allow you to "rate" comments too (I guess like kuro5hin's "anybody can moderate" system), but there's little evidence that anybody actually takes advantage of this, and as you might expect, the few ratings that do get done don't seem to have much meaning (i.e., high-rated comments typically don't seem to be very good ones). As others have mentioned. there's also no apparent threading of comments, which makes it hard to follow them as a series of conversations, and reinforces the "random" nature of the result.

Another problem with digg is one shared by most "slashdot-like" sites (included many that use slashcode): most stories have very few comments, which means that few achieve the "critical mass" necessary to get a really good discussion going.

Finally, the digg user-community seems far more average than Slashdot's -- despite all the trolls, Slashdot has an unusually high degree of smart and knowledgeable users, and the moderation system tends to make their comments visible (and hide those of the trolls). Fundamentally it's the boring users (posting banal pointless comments) that make most web-forums so awful, and Digg has this problem in spades. Slashdot's elaborate mechanisms may seem unfair to some, but they do a pretty good job of keeping conversations focused and interesting, which is exactly what Digg comments aren't.

The end result is that Digg is actually quite lame; I don't know why people are getting so excited about it. It you want more anarchy (but more crap) than Slashdot, Kuro5hin appears to offer roughly the same functionality implemented more competently, with a somewhat more clueful user community.

Re:Naval Gazing?

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?

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 [wikipedia.org].

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.

Re:Naval Gazing?

To some extent I agree, but I left Digg after a few weeks of trying it out. Why? Because there was a lot of useless crap posted that made the main page. In fact, there was more useless crap there than I found on Slashdot. Yes, we have substantially more astroturfing and adverarticles, but at least here people point them out. And those people get moderated up when they do. On digg, if a person or two point out that everyone is sending clicks to a paid-per-view website disguised as an article, they get lost in the shuffle.

Another issue I saw was that when users can vote-in articles, one runs into the problem that most users are fucking morons. I saw the same article hit the frontpage 3x in one day, actually being on it in two locations at once. Different submitters, apparently different people voting it in. Not worse than slashdot, but when I come here, at least people realize that it's a dupe. The other issue is that someone can submit a story into the "submission pool" as often as they want. I saw one shitty-ass self-promotion show up, after a bunch of morons "Dugg" it. Checking the submitters history, they had submitted the same article SEVEN TIMES in the last two days, with slightly different writeups.

While Digg could be better, it won't be until they learn how to moderate (and thread) comments. When intelligent and insightful people can speak up on the topic at hand, everyone wins. When they get drowned out by trolls and omg-me-too-fanboys, the article has to stand on its own merits. While I see the power of a democratic system of story submissions, I'll take useful editors over it any day. Currently, Digg's voting system isn't much worse than the editors here.

Re:Naval Gazing?

Who on /. hasn't spent hours staring at the C, contemplating its mysteries and trying to fathom its depths?

Re:Naval Gazing?

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/ [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?

I've been to Digg, and their stories are much more current than Slashdot's [...] And, despite Slashdot's flawed moderation system, scanning article comments at +4 is usually a pleasant experience, and I can't find that kind of functionality on Digg as an anonymous reader.

I think those points are two sides of the same coin. We don't come to /. for the news, we come here to talk about yesterday's news and an important part of every productive discussion is that all sides are familiar with the topic and have an informed (*cough* but we *are* talking about +4 here) opinion about it.

/. - Watercooler discussions for nerds. Stuff that mattered a few days ago.

Re:Naval Gazing?

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 [slashdot.org].

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?

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.

My comparison

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:My comparison

Slashdot: Stories are often days old (and duplicates abound).

They are not duplicates. They are a Beowulf Cluster of Stories.

Re:My comparison

That's both the strength and the major weekness of Digg. It shows you what the majority wants to see. For now that means it's only slightly obnoxious. As it becomes popular with more mainstream "tech" guys it will become less and less useful for people with niche interests. We already have media that caters to the mainstream, and they know exactly how to draw readers. Just because it's user driven doesn't mean the front page won't look more and more like a cross between a variety of trade rags, just a few weeks early.

I don't know about you, but I could care less about what the majority of people want to read. I want to read what *I* want to read, and the best way to do that is to find a site that is moderated in a way that matches your interests.

Hopefully the people who like Digg better will go there instead, and stop bitching about how their stories got rejected in off topic slashdot comments.

Dupes

Slashdot: Targeted by very technical editors, I generally want to hear about 40% of the stories.


I want to hear about 20% of the stories, twice each.

Already read this?

Every other story I've read on /. over the past few weeks has had at least one comment saying, "Hey, get your act together, this was on Digg 3 days ago!"

I wonder how long it'll take for someone to post one here?

Re:Already read this?

Everything was on Digg three days ago. But it will take you three more days to find it.

Digg?

Dugg

A Critical Difference

A Slashdot post will get you traffic, if you have a site linked to your user id. That's not the case with Digg. Ergo, Slashdot wins. It gives you more for participating. For Web site owners, traffic has real value.

Re:A Critical Difference

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'.)

nothing to see here

Please go away. You are finding Digg very very boring, you want to stay with Slashdot. Nothing to see at all. Mmmmkay?

Digg Mentioned on Slashdot...

Slashdot x Digg = The DigDot Effect
...
*Internet explodes*

Digg (revisited)

I've been checking out digg for the past few weeks. The only real advantage I see to it over slashdot is that you can see all the submitted articles and vote them up to the front page. The downside of that is that there's a whole lotta crap to filter through. And there's nobody to blame for the dupes. And the comment system sucks. And the dupes. Oh, and many of the posters seem to be 15 (at least those tend to get modded down on /.).

Re:Digg (revisited)

You're right about the crap problem, and it will only get worse. As Digg continues to expand, so the number of users submitting stories is increasing. If we assume there's only so much interesting news a day, the crap ratio is going to increase as well. This seems to be happening already.

Digg will implode if the expansion continues, because no-one will be bothered to digg for anything that isn't on the front page. So in the end, those that have the time/inclination to wade through the stories will end up becoming pseudo-editors (you can promote a story on just 50 diggs if you submit at the right time), and then it'll either get dugg more by people who enjoyed it and can't be bothered to digg for stories, or it'll be reported out. Front page stories will only end up being the ones that the pseudo-editors like.

Losing the Digg we're-all-equal-community ethos seems inevitable. They should give up, and start weighting user votes. For example: users who post stories that are often promoted; those who digg stories that are often promoted; or those that comment well should have their submitted stories in one pool. Stories below this privledged status go into another one. The stories for all will still go to the front page, but the more esoteric stuff that a sizable majority enjoy reading about (which really made Digg; getting stories interesting to you that editors didn't think were worthy) will end up in the privaledged pool.

Like Taco said, scalability is going to be a big problem if you aren't ruling from the top-down.

So Who's Goin' Down First?

Ok, so /. links a story to them, and they link one back. The question is, who's servers are gonna melt down first?

Late again

Digg.com had this article posted six hours ago.

Re:Late again

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 [diggvsdot.com] 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.

Re:Late again

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.

Let's Look at the Comments...

On the Slashdot front page, at the time of this posting, the most recent five articles have 17, 124, 101, 178, and 232 comments.

On the Digg front page, the most recent five have 1, 6, 5, 15, and 13 comments.

Yep, Slashdot is REALLY in danger.

I really hate this...

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!!

$2.8 million???

I thought that whole dot-com bubble was over. $2.8 million just because it's a high traffic site? You gotta be kidding me... I run a real business with real assets and real profit, but these stupid investors don't care. I honestly don't think that the dot-com bubble is over yet if sites like this can get $2.8 million for simply existing. There's nothing really unique about the site to warrant that kind of capital investment.

I bet you didn't use the magic words:

"Web 2.0" and "AJAX"

Instant VC hard-on

Re:$2.8 million???

Over the weekend digg had a "story" submitted showing that digg's pageviews had surpassed slashdots. The "story" was a link to Alexa's site comparing graphs of the two. Keep in mind that Alexa measures this information via people who have the Alexa toolbar for IE (which many consider to be spyware) installed on their machines. I think this says far more about the technical awareness of the visitors of the two sites than anything.

Digg and /.

I have both open in a firefox tab as both offer something to me that I find useful. With digg, you get stories that are generally "fresher", by days or in some cases even hours--which is like forever in "web speed". However, there stories are also all over the board and many are jsut links to other peoples' blogs--(e.g. "I hate the cold heat soldering iron blog story"--big deal) and I only "digg" about 10% of them. Comments are for all practical purposes useless compared to /. [when viewed at the appropriate threshold]. /. if more like a tortise if digg is the hare. Stories on /. have already been on digg 1,2,3 or more times already, but in taking it's time..it's damn sweet time, in getting stories out, I find more of the stories to be more the "stuff that matters" than I find on digg. /. has its trolls and flame tossing ACs, but in general you can find good discussions here as long as you don't mentions religion, politics (ignore the sig please), GW, or MS. Digg's comments seem more like where ACs are born or where the /. trolls go to play once no one bites on them here.

If you haven't seen digg.com, check it out. There will be some interesting stuff there, but it's no replacement for /. IMHO

wow

> Digg is more chaotic, immediate and user driven, whereas
> Slashdot features more in-depth and technical discussions.

*shudders*

Digg can't really be that bad?

In-depth and technical discussions?

whereas Slashdot features more in-depth and technical discussions

Right next to the "Frist Prost!" and GNAA posts, Natalie Portman and hot grits jokes, Soviet Russia/Korea/Overlord memes, pop culture references, polls with "CowboyNeal" options, general trolls*, Nigerian spam rip-offs, and bad puns? Unpossible!*

*I'm aware of the irony. Don't mod me troll... please?

What I hear form all my non /. friends

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:What I hear form all my non /. friends

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.

You nailed it, in a sort of derogatory way. Allow me to reciprocate (maybe not directly targetted at yourself, but oh well :)

Slashdot, as long as I've known it (6, 7 years?), has always been targetted towards more technical types. More nerdy types (hey, it's in the tagline!). More obsessive types. We're the ones who get addicted to Evercrack. We're the ones who laugh at every obscure Simpsons joke, because we know damn near every line off the top of our heads. We're the ones who compusively try out every new Linux distro, spending hours of time playing with obscure computer minutiae (probably spelled that one wrong!) instead of doing things the rest of the world sees as normal.

It's always been this way. There has always been a very visible pro-Linux, anti-Microsoft slant here. Because overall, that's how the really geeky think. We also think we're smarter than everyone else, and that our viewpoint is the correct one.

THAT IS THE POINT OF SLASHDOT. I've never heard Rob whining that he doesn't get enough of the "common person" checking out his site. Most long-time readers aren't whining about the lack of MCSEs commenting on Linux stories. No one who actually spends any time here can seriously think of this as a general tech news site, aimed at anyone with a slight technical leaning.

I don't think it's so much a matter of trolls driving people away, it's just that most normal people look at Slashdot and realize it's not for them.

If you want to point out that Linux is hard for your Mom, that's one thing. If you're going to complain that you simply aren't interested in learning how your OS works, and that you shouldn't have to edit text files, and that Open Source is useless because not everyone is a coder, then guess what?

This site is not for you.

Apply those sorts of criteria to virtually any other discussion we have here. Hell, we just had a poll for "the most realistic nerd portrayal on TV". We're geeks. The majority of us like Linux. If you can accept that, you can have fun here, even if you're not as weird as the rest of us. If you can't, you're just going to find this site frustrating. There are plenty of other places to go for news. Even pro-Microsoft sites, and places where people almost never mention the Simpsons.

Personally, like the small marketshare of desktop Linux, I love it this way.