Digg has turned to total crap

But you knew that already, right? Admittedly, it was a bit crap to begin with, at least since I’ve been using it. I did find some useful articles in there, and I had fun digging things up and down (especially comments!). It’s a bit of an addictive medium, but that only works when there’s good content coming up.

I have been subscribed to the digg design and tech news feeds for a couple of months now. I liked how the design section featured all types of design. It’s interesting to see what’s being done with cars, interiors, and industrial design. I think all design fields could learn a lot from each other.

I think the people who run some of these social networking sites have suffered from lack of experience with online communities. They believe that the users will moderate the system for them, but that isn’t always working. And it’s working less and less as more website owners figure out that social bookmarking sites might help them get more traffic. I think digg is showing the effects of that now. The bad content is outweighing the good stuff and people can’t be bothered to sort through it all anymore. I used to go through the design upcoming section and ocassionally I’d find some good stuff in there. But mostly I’d be digging down spam. And now there’s much more spam than good stuff. The design section is now littered with bad SEO advice, desktop wallpapers, and cheap templates.

What do these sites need to learn? The old adage “give them an inch and they’ll take a mile” applies to online communities. Specifically, if you let people post links to their own sites, they will. And they will do it a lot. And they will have no qualms about what type of content they post, where they post it, or whether it’s appropriate for the site. I have seen some social bookmarking sites littered with porn spam links. How good is that for users? Are you really going to revisit a site that comes up with that crap? Or what about the stuff that’s not even in English? It might be good content and all, but it’s completely useless when you don’t speak the language.

Forum owners have been dealing with this for years. We’ve come up with all sorts of measures to prevent people from spamming. At TWF we have specific permissions set for our Market Place area. You can’t advertise if you don’t have enough posts. At Sitepoint they make people pay for listings in certain areas. At Digital Point you can’t post a link at all until you have a certain number of posts. Webmaster World has an even more restrictive policy on linking: no promotional links to your own site allowed, including signatures. These things do make things more difficult for honest users, but forum owners find they are necessary to control spam. Why? Becuase we’ve learned that if you don’t have controls the spammers will do everything they can to take advantage of you and it could turn users away from your site for good.

In reality, social bookmarking sites only work if you make a lot of friends and share content amongst yourselves. Great, if you can find people to be friends with. The system doesn’t make it easy for you to do this. Very little information is available in the profiles. Tagging is limited. You can’t filter friends’ listings to see only the stuff you’re interested in. You can’t even contact anyone. On digg, you’re going to have a hard time finding people who aren’t into video games, Linux, and liberal US politics.

I think the ideal case could be a system that is based on friendships to start with. You join a network of people interested in the same topics. The system makes it easy for anyone to make friends. You share links. There is some mechanism to allow meaningful communication between members, and more detailed profiles so people can actually get to know each other instead of intereacting with tiny avatars and meaningless screennames. Ma.gn.olia sort of has this going but there aren’t enough people there to make it useful and there is no real concept of counts on bookmarks. Del.icio.us is an improvement over digg with all the tagging, but there is no way to find out more about people or communicate with them in any way. Both are more oriented towards bookmarks than news.

Anyway, I think I’m going to turn off my digg feeds. It’s time to move on.

Update: I was talking to Liam about this and he said that it’s really just been reduced to the lowest common denominator. Sensational, popular topics that appeal to the largest portion of the audience with little complex thought involved. You hate Microsoft? Check, that’s a digg. Enough for them! I think the spam problem has had something to do with this because it has driven away intelligent people who would digg up quality content.

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