Comments on: Netscape’s digg-clone not doing so well?

By: ninjoah

ninjoah — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 00:04:04 +0000

My favorite social news site is http://leetdaily.com. It's strictly for gaming, but puts a twist on voting by giving articles a Leet Percentage Rating. Really cool and innovative.

By: Peter Chng

Peter Chng — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 14:19:55 +0000

The problem (or some would say, advantage), of “bottom-up” news sites is that, like you said, they’re very specific to one topic or niche. For some areas, like technology/web stuff, this is good, since most of the stories covered wouldn’t normally be covered by a mainstream news site, so that makes it very interesting to those who visit/contribute to it.

At the same time, the site becomes very much self-serving. This makes it a poor choice for mainstream news, since most people don’t want to contribute “interesting” stories, but are rather just looking for news media to give them the important stories. Netscape/AOL didn’t understand this; they only saw what could be a cash cow and wanted to milk it – you can see this by the multitude of ads on the site, and how they try very hard to keep you on their site to view those ads.

You’re very right about groups “hijacking” sites like this as well. It’s been rumoured that Digg is basically run by a group of 60 or so hardcore users, who are the ones who consistently submit stories and usually get their stories to the front page. Once a story gets to the front page, it’s bound to get more diggs and become super-popular. Hence, this group is basically a set of defacto editors. Though, in this case, I don’t have a problem with it, since the quality of stories is fairly interesting in my opinion, so they’ve set Digg in the right direction. But the idea of “community-oriented” and “by the people” is merely a facade, not only because there’s a hardcore group in control, but because most people don’t even want to participate in the submission of stories and are content just to read.

While I enjoy Digg for the multitude of interesting articles it provides, it suffers from mob-rule far too often – far too often, people who have legitimite opinions that differ from the majority get their comments “modded” down into oblivion as if they were trolls. On the upside, there does tend to be less immature discourse on the site, helping to keep a fairly high signal-to-noise ratio.

By: Glen

Glen — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 01:59:25 +0000

“worst of both worlds” describes it very well.
In terms of content, I hate the new Netscape (and most other “bottom-up” news sites). I find that my interests are not well served by the masses, especially when it comes to the political world, where radicals are more present online, and where the left of centre virtually owns the media.

This type of system allows small special interest groups to hijack the “news”. Take a look, for eg, at the story about the 9/11 “Truth” commission. This isn’t news. This is conspiracy theory. Right up there with Elvis, Tupac, the Moon Landing & Kenneth Lay (which I saw up there last week). Even look at the names of the 2004 presidential candidates named in the article: Libertarian, Green, Write-in and Ralph Nader (Independent). Those guys must be credible. They garnered what, maybe a million votes across the US?

In terms of the web 2.0 stuff, I wouldnt know. I would definately not categorize myself as tech-savvy, all I can comment on is style. Poor. The ads are too prevalent. I’ve even changed my Netscape homepage. Not that I use netscape anymore. (go firefox)