Digging on Digg

by on November 27, 2006

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.

  • Ilya Korolev
    Robert, why you don't customize news sections you want to read and subscribe only on that feed?
  • 7of7
    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.
  • Ben
    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?
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Hey, I tried adding your link blog to my RSS and it just shows "dead links" to somewhere on yourminis!! ??? Any help?

    Rex
  • 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.
  • 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?
  • Gave up Digg a couple of months ago,Slashdot and techmeme rock.
    Nice to see you posting in GMT
  • Savvy! thanks for reminding me, just resubscribed to Slashdot too.
  • 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..
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