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.

Let's Look at the Comments...

[TooMuchEspressoGuy]

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.

Re:Naval Gazing?

[cawpin]

"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."

You obviously don't look too hard. The threshold for comments is right under the "Comments" title. As for threading, I prefer it not threaded. I can read all the comments on one page and easily see who is replying to whom. Threaded replies are just a pain. That's why it took so long to reply to you as a I had to go throught all the replies to make sure someone hadn't already said what I wanted to.

So there.

Re:Naval Gazing?

[GFunk83]

I'd like to see Digg with a better commenting system and some form of user-moderation of posts...

There is actually a user-driven commenting system:
-3 SPAM
-2 Flame
-1 Off Topic
0
+1 Useful
+2 Insightful
+3 Excellent

This isn't as specific (or targeted, if you prefer) as the Slashdot moderation system, but that's probably okay because, as some other posters have mentioned, digg is more focused on the stories than the comments. However, it would be nice if the current system worked well. As it is, most users either don't know how to use the moderation feature or don't care to use it.

There is no threading (seriously hard to follow conversations without threading).

Threading is another thing I'd really like to see on digg. Many users currently reply to eachother by using "@[username]" before the content of their reply.

Kevin Rose?

[Anonymous Coward]

Was Digg.com brought to us by Kevin Rose? The same guy that was on The Screen Savers and Attack of the Show on G4tv? I thought his picture looked familiar. Can anyone confirm? If so, that's cool. It's nice to see him doing so well after his TV stints.

Re:$2.8 million???

[Anonymous Coward]

According to alexa [alexa.com] they are doing 40 million page views a day. If the ad click through rate is an abysmal 0.1% and they only make 10 cents a click, they would still have revenue of $4000/day (or 1.5 million a year). I don't know what there operating cost is, but I think 1.5 million will easily pay 4-5 employees a reasonable salary and cover hosting expenses.

Re:Naval Gazing?

[smitke]

I like http://diggvsdot.com./ [diggvsdot.com.]
Using their scoring system Slashdot doesn't look that bad.
However, if they had a -1 for delays longer than 24 hours Digg would score much better.

Slashdot may post earlier sometimes but Digg rarely is more than 24 hours behind.
Slashdot was 30+ hours behind on a number of stories.

I read Slashdot for the great comments.
Digg looks like a good alternative if /.ers are annoying.