Anything but snowflakes, II
October 22, 2006Speaking of people not being snowflakes, let’s talk Digg. As some of you will know, I thoroughly detest Digg and its complete lack of quality control. You just have to take a look at any given moment at Digg’s front page to see what I mean. Of course it also does not help Digg is a slow and heavy piece of shit of a website.
Anyway, today Digg readers reached their all-time low. A close-up picture of a cat’s tongue made it to the front page. I kid you not. One picture of a cat’s tongue made it to the front page of a multi-million viewer’s website.
I mean, it’s great Digg exists, and it’s definitely not a bad concept or anything. It’s just that it will never be a replacement for the traditional gatekeeping model of journalism, no matter how many communitywebtwodotoh people want you to believe it will. I mean, all you have to do to make it to Digg’s frontpage is put any of the following words in your headline: “FREE”, “CHEAP”, “PICTURES”, “VIDEOS”, or anything similar to those. That’s not journalism, that’s populism.
To get back to snowflakes– Digg proves, as well, people are not snowflakes.
I know that both you and Eugenia are kind of “anti-Web 2.0,” but I don’t get it. Digg is not supposed to be news, it’s supposed to be a way for people to share cool links. I think this is a “kinda neat” picture. I’d never seen a cat’s tongue up close, nor did I ever want to, until I say it, and then said, “Hmm… pretty cool.”
If you think it’s sensationalistic, stay away, no? I find A LOT of cool stuff on digg, and it’s one of my favorite sites since the content moves so quickly. Who cares if shit shows up on the front page - it’s gone before I care anyway.
Mob mentality doesn’t scare me, since there’s no commitment in CLICKING a link. If something earns more diggs because it happened to make it to the front page, so what? Most of the stuff I find from digg was worth the 90 seconds I spent on the link anyway.
Comment by Adam Scheinberg — October 22, 2006 @ 1:14 pm
It’s not that I detest the function of Digg; like I said, it’s a good concept and it’s great it exists. However, what I do detest is this attitude some people have that Digg and Digg-like sites will take over the function from traditional news outlets, when clearly this is not the case.
I visit Digg maybe once every two weeks, and every time, I’m simply annoyed by how much nonsense you ahve to tolerate before you find the real news. Digg.com is being portrayed as a newssite, when clearly, it is not (it’s more of a link sharing site). I hate it when people claim something be something else than that it in fact really is.
My problem with Web 2.0, by the way, is not the sites themselves, but more the term. It implies the web is somehow vastly different today than it was 2 years ago, which is total nonsense. I’m not really fond of buzzwords anyway.
Comment by Administrator — October 22, 2006 @ 1:37 pm
Well said Thom. I agree.
Personally, I visit Digg 2-3 times a day. I use the site. But yes, there’s lots of crap in there.
Comment by Eugenia — October 22, 2006 @ 6:06 pm