Daily misery

No, this is not going to be a long post :-).

Personally, I look at both Digg and Slashdot as different kind of sites. Stuff like the newest css hacks, javascript functions or Mac gadgets make it to the front page of Digg all the time whereas topics in /. often covers stuff on GPL, nanotech, bioscience and computer-science related topics. Conclusion? They both serve a different kind of audience. Instead of throwing those two sites into a versus-to-versus game, i think they compliment each others existence rather well.

Since no one is replacing anyone, we can now discuss in a more general terms as to why the overall reading experience in Digg is just not as pleasant or informative as Slashdot. It is not even close. Maybe that’s not what Digg is supposed to be anyway - it is just a directory of links. But if you disagree anyway, I suppose I can put forward a number of reasons here for some pondering sessions.

Slashdot produces many classic web-talks. The goatse, profit! and cmdTaco jokes always make me laugh. Still remember the metaphorical game in the Verizon vs Google post? That’s brilliant. The peer-reviewed commenting system just works there. When it’s modded funny, it is funny and the same goes to being informative, insightful and etc.
I’ve forgotten how many times slashdot readers remind me there’s other side of the story on news we come across everyday. Insightful comments make you think, reevaluate your views and if you dare to put half-baked, unproven comment backed by biased sources, you will get shot down by many counter examples. This kind of intelligent discourse is lacking not just in Digg but majority of other Internet news site too. The first 5 comments in Digg are always about how this post has been dugged, or it is old news or some pricks trying to show off his inept ability to spell the word f***. I dont get anything out of Digg except for links.

Of course this gets pretty annoying after some times. In fact it is the reason why I decide to pull this entry out of my dusty draft directory and post it. I went to Digg the other day and found an awesome news about a light bulb manufactured in 1901 that still burns bright to this day. And guess what, the post was hijacked by those good ol Digg users with useless comments with replies ranging from the usual and annoying ‘old news + report’ to those ‘fuck this and that’ stuff. Ok maybe you’ve read about this before, or maybe that it has been dugg before but the fact that it ends up on the front page means that this is still a new, unread and freaking interesting material to most of us. What’s the good of your ‘old news, do a search man, dugg’ comments will do for us besides from taking up one extra entry in Digg’s sql database?

And yesterday there was this post about Razorback (one of the more prominent Edonkey’s index server) got taken down and the comments were filled with people saying how Bit Torrent is awesome and eDonkey can burn in hell. It just feels so much like there’re a bunch of teenagers out there with raging hormones trying to push all their opinions on EVERYTHING down my throat, regardless of what’s the discussion on the table that time.

In fact, Andy phrased it better:

It seems that Digg is the domain of angry teenagers with gobs of time on their hands, basking in the glow of utter anonymity, all entered in some sort of contest to see who can use the word “F__” most often and in the most creative manner.

To put it in a simple way of how different the reading experience is - I go to slashdot and I spent probably the next 45 minutes there on average. As of Digg, 2 minutes are all I need to open all the links in the front page on a new tab in my browser. Maybe it’s the audience demography, or the yellow background in the comments section, or the slow loading time of the site (like 10 javascript external links?), or maybe those teenies commentors are just starting to get into my head.