What happened to Digg?
I remember back not so long ago when I was really addicted to Digg. I mean, the idea was awesome that users could submit news and stories and they get voted on by their peers. I loved visiting it several times a day to catch up on really interesting tech news, learn about some new site or software, and get linked up to blogs that I would have otherwise probably never found out about.
So what the heck happened?
Now, Digg is mostly populated by users that submit content that is so irrelevant, I can’t believe that anyone took the time to create it, much less post it on another site for all the world to cherish and vote on. If you look at the majority of stories that hit the front page of Digg, over half of it will be useless, odd, or just simply unoriginal content that has been on the front page in some other form 30 times before. The one thing that made Digg great was the interesting content that you could read there, and now, even that is very slim on a good day.
As with most sites that become popular, there is only so much quality control that you can do without suppressing your user base, but sometimes it just has to be done, and this is clearly one thing that Digg did not learn. Now granted, they have some measures in place to moderate content and prevent duplicate content, but what the heck happened to the measure that prevents useless content?? Somehow, it got left out in favor of popularity I think.
More importantly, I think this has to do with the user base of Digg. If you look at the overall user base of Digg, then the content you find there fits right in. Just as it does for Newsvine, the Newsvine user base is very broad, so the content obviously stays just as broad. Don’t get me wrong, Digg does provide some relevant news but sometimes you really have to muddle through the garbage to find it. I remember when that wasn’t so. I remember when only the best and most relevant news hit the front page, and the other garbage got buried, just like it should have.
The other problem, which Digg has supposedly fixed, is the fact that content began to get outweighed by friends and what friends were posting. Suddenly, you started seeing stuff from certain users, regardless of what the content was, getting pushed to the front page just because they were a top poster on Digg. Friends lists on Digg became the deciding factor on what got pushed up and what didn’t. Almost like it was a contest to see who could get Dugg the most, regardless of whether the content was worthy or not. In my opinion, this factor alone all but killed Digg, especially for me.
So, will Digg ever get back to being the excellent information source that it once was? I don’t know, and I just simply don’t care to stick around and find out. There are far too many other great sources of information out there now that have taken the Digg model and made what Digg used to be. If you are a Digg user, I would love to hear your thoughts, and whether or not you still enjoy Digg, cause I am totally over it.
Maybe one day………..
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Sounds like yer a techy guy who wanted digg to stay an inbreed tool for IT guys.