Digging on Digg
Through my news reader this morning I’ve seen several complaints about Digg. I too unsubscribed from the general Digg feed. Too much crap! I agree with Businessweek’s Rob Hof. TechMeme and TailRank are much better.
I think Digg is trying to get outside of the geekosphere, which will make its valuations better (normal people don’t read geeky stuff about Ruby on Rails or Java), but definitely make it noisier and less useful to people like me and Rob.
I put the best stuff on my link blog. Oh, and someone asked if my link blog has a feed that can be subscribed to. Yes, it does, subscribe to my link blog here.
Powered By 
November 27th, 2006 at 3:25 am
Thank god, now I got a reliable guy to support my thoughts on digg…I am swicthing back to slashdot.org, no matter what…I can’t read more on CSS hacks, and “linux works on this…” stuff..
November 27th, 2006 at 3:35 am
Savvy! thanks for reminding me, just resubscribed to Slashdot too.
November 27th, 2006 at 4:37 am
Gave up Digg a couple of months ago,Slashdot and techmeme rock.
Nice to see you posting in GMT
November 27th, 2006 at 7:23 am
I agree. It seems most of the diggs are from teenage boys. So, do you all think I should drop the digg tech feed from Tech News Mashup?
November 27th, 2006 at 7:29 am
Digg has systemic problems with the way it’s set up. Techmeme actually does a better job of leveraging the “Wisdom of the Crowds” because (my understanding is that) the way it works revolves around bloggers, who more or less choose stories independently and blind to what anyone else is doing.
Digg, on the other hand, encourages much more of a groupthink or herd mentality - the number of Diggs is displayed prominently, encouraging you to Digg stories that already have a lot of them, you’re encouraged to subscribe to the top Diggers, you’re encouraged to subscribe to your friends, etc. As such, individual stories are elevated much more because of network effects than group wisdom.
Other issues include the fact that the front page doesn’t even try to ascribe importance to stories - the top headline is just the one that’s most recently been promoted, not necessarily the top story of the day. And if you subscribe to the feed, forget it - your RSS reader just gets flooded with junk.
There’s usually some interesting links on the front page, and I’ll check it out when I’m bored. I like the concept of social news, but honestly that’s what I regard “The Blogosphere” as. Technorati, Techmeme, Google News, and Google Reader are all much more useful to me than sites like Digg.
November 27th, 2006 at 8:12 am
Hey, I tried adding your link blog to my RSS and it just shows “dead links” to somewhere on yourminis!! ??? Any help?
Rex
November 27th, 2006 at 9:44 am
I unsubbed from the general feed a while back, too, but it has category feeds, so I’ve subscribed to a number of them and it’s much less noisy.
November 27th, 2006 at 9:45 am
I too have unsubscribed from the Digg feed. Your “too much crap” statement summarizes things nicely. I’ve found that if something is likely to matter, it will turn up in one of the 220 or so feeds that I follow and I don’t need to worry about Digg.
November 27th, 2006 at 10:07 am
[...] Digg has more than its fair share of weaknesses, but that is simply because it is a yet-to-be-perfected medium of disseminating information, which is not without its advantages. I would not be as quick as Scoble & Co. to dismiss the importance of Digg. [...]
November 27th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
[...] Rob mentions how others have come to the same conclusion, including venture capitalist Jeff Nolan. Former Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble has unsubscribed from Digg because he says there is just too much crap. With my usual flair for the coinage of new terms, I like to call this the “too much crap” problem, or TMC for short. [...]
November 27th, 2006 at 2:26 pm
This is uncanny. I posted about my annoyance with the Digg main feed just a couple of days ago. Seems there is a bit of a groundswell here.
I suppose Digg would argue that the category feeds are less noisy, but perhaps there is a requirement here for some sort of ‘best of the best’ Digg feed?
November 27th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
[...] Here’s more reading on the subject: Scoble agrees Digg has too much crap, another blogger complains about the duplication in the main site feed, and another complaint about the quality. [...]
November 27th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
While it’s certainly true that Digg is largely “crap”, that can be expected given most Diggers appear to about 13. The worst part about Digg isn’t the crap content but the techno drone aspect of it. The social news strategy employed by Digg has failed and become simply a marketing machine for whatever companies are in vogue. Given that, Digg is no more interesting to read than a Circuit City ad. It is like a 24 hour infomercial for Wii, Apple, and Linux. Ronco should be proud.
November 27th, 2006 at 8:37 pm
Digg - Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em?
These days I can’t go through any news aggregating sites without seeing at least 1 or 2 stories about Digg. The social news site has been stirring up a lot of controversy lately, check out this list: algorithm updates admission of moderators stories r…
November 27th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
[...] Techmeme started posting a spot about sponsored links. In my opinion Techmeme accepting sponsored links is a bad idea, why? Well because all it is then is advertised space. This is the whole reason that me and Michael wrote Ferreals… It’s a hard deal to have because having something that is democratic (like Digg) leads to some issues. Just as digg could be gamed so could a system where when not sponsored you have to depend on the taste of the “awarder” to post the link…so to sponsor or not to sponsor, that is the question. [...]
November 27th, 2006 at 9:45 pm
Robert, why you don’t customize news sections you want to read and subscribe only on that feed?
November 28th, 2006 at 4:56 am
[...] Yesterday Blogger Extraordinare Robert Scoble on his blog confessed that he no longer subscribes to the Digg.com general feed because there is “Too much crap!” [...]
November 30th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
[...] Well, welcome to the backlash. “Digg just isn’t doing anything for me to make my day easier,” writes Jeff Nolan in a post titled ‘I’m done with Digg.’ Adds BusinessWeek’s Rob Hof: “As much as I like the idea of Digg…I must confess that I just don’t use it that much.” Then Robert Scoble piles on: “I too unsubscribed from the general Digg feed,” he writes. “Too much crap!” [...]
December 14th, 2006 at 8:15 am
[...] Still up for debate is how useful of the mashup phenomena is for those reading and seeking an alternative to traditional news mediums, as well as to the future of citizen journalism. AListReview author Diane Ensey’s questioned Digg’s irrelivance after noticing Robert Scoble’s post about the content becoming more generalized, but less useful for techies. I have noticed similar concerns on Newsvine as the site developers continue to improve usability. [...]
January 15th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
[...] RSS feeds and get only the most relevant stories. This way you can avoid the headaches that Robert Scoble and Rob Hof had to suffer [...]
March 8th, 2007 at 10:01 am
[...] User Frustration. Digg users have requested a separate Digg section for pictures, receiving thousands of diggs: here and here. One Digg user even showed how easy it was to get stupid pictures rated high on Digg. Even demigod Robert Scoble has criticized Digg for “Too much crap!” [...]