May 27 2006
Digg To Bring Lynch Mob Flame Wars to Regular News!
Whoopdeediddlydo.
Digg is going to have regular news sections now. That means that the childish flamewars, gang mentality mobs, and overly hypersensitive children along with armchair revolutionaries will now have a forum to themselves. Of course that doesn’t mean the tech section will suddenly clear up, but it does mean that the flame wars should be more contained.
While sites like Lost Remote (whom I respect a great deal) seem to see this as a positive move, I’m not totally convinced. To me, this is more of a response to the fact that they can’t get the site under control and can’t keep regular news and flamewars from the tech section so they’re just embracing what they can’t control.
Digg has a long way to go before they’re a site I’ll ever return to.
Technorati Tags: digg
May 29th, 2006 at 10:24 pm
If you don’t see it as positive (and no harm done if you don’t) I see no real reason to see it as a negative. Digg has a lot going for it. For one - I use it to, pardon, dig up a lot of stories for LR. Yeah, the flame wars are a part of life there. But sifting through junk for gold is a fact of life on the web. It’s messy and all, but you and I are free speech maniacs - so isn’t this just a logical extension?
On Memorial Day, as we sincerely give thanks to those who died for our right to have wonderful, stupid, important, unimportant, wreckless, meaningful, petty and world-changing debate - shouldn’t we encourage anything that opens dialogue a little more?
WWJD? (What Would Jefferson Do?) - Safran
May 29th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
I don’t only because I don’t think it’s going to be as good as its ideal.
Ideally community based editing of a site sounds great. More people like a story and therefore more people read it, promote it, whatever, and the cream rises to the top.
What ended up happening on Digg, however, was that a large number of stories were simply flame bait, the ensuing comments were flames, and so on.
You’re right, digging through the crap to find the gold is indeed part of the web, and they have every single solitary right to be there. For me, who has about 500 RSS feeds in my feed reader, I really don’t need someone to tell me what’s important. Most of the time, Digg was merely a summary of what was already in some other feed I was already reading with the addition of some mundane flame wars about Mac vs. Windows, Linux v. Windows, and a nice helping of George Bush is the antichrist (a debatable point, but nonetheless inappapropriate for a tech news site) and so on.
Not as useful for me