It took a little while but I’ve kind of come to terms with what I liked about the older versions of digg, and what I don’t like about reddit.
On the old digg, if I had an account, I could say “don’t show me stories from this category” or “only show these categories.” Although at times I went into the upcoming streams, or into the comments, mostly I used digg for simply seeing a stream of news from around the internet. My list of categories to watch was nearly all of them. The front page algorithm “seemed” to be that once something was up for “promotion” it hit the stream, and although the diggs could keep rising or falling it’s place was mostly “cemented” on the front page, in front of stories that came thru the algorithm before it and behind stories that came after it. Sure, if it got enough buries it would fall off the front page, but that didn’t happen a whole lot. This is what I wanted from digg. A stream of news picked up by a larger community. I could read a headline and ignore it if I knew I didn’t care, or read thru the description/look at the thumbnail if it seemed interesting, then go thru farther if it piqued my interest.
Digg v4’s new “My News” system, although seemingly innovative, breaks the concept completely. It SOUNDS like a great idea, and for the first few days of beta I was really into it. Then I started noticing problems. It became a parser of sites. All their articles were thrown up on My News in the order digg found them. I was better off going to each individual site because then I could at least filter out these new fake digg advertisements much easier.
The Top News, which replaces the old front page, doesn’t feel right, either. It feels far, far more limited. I feel like I see a much more constrained version of the front page, there isn’t as much “random crap.” That sounds good, but really in my opinion it isn’t. The old random crap was “Top 10 reasons why you should totally get high and go watch Iron Man 2” and shit like that. Things I knew I could blow off from reading 3 words. Now, the new Top News is “all good content.” Again, that sounds good, but I don’t like it. Although I didn’t read half of what I saw on the front page, I liked seeing it there because I knew that it had “earned” it’s place on the front page. People dugg it up, so it was put on there. Now, it’s just a stream of entries from blogs I rarely — if ever — read, and about stuff I rarely — if ever — care about. This probably why so many people are complaining about “digg selling out.” I don’t think digg sold out, I think they worked out an algorithm so that the “everyone sees this” content is more mature, grown up. This is probably a good business move, but I don’t care for it.
I tried “replacing” digg with reddit, but it doesn’t fit my needs either. I like reddit’s system of subreddits, categories for specific news. I can make sure the pot group isn’t in my list and I’m moderately certain I won’t see random pothead crap. I add atheism to my list and sure enough, I see more atheism things. The problem is the front page itself feels like it’s taking all my subs, and haphazardly placing together a list. I’ll hit the front page, see something is listed as the second story. Later it’ll be fifth. Come back again it’s back up to the second. There isn’t one, consistent “this is ever last god damned thing that’s earned to the right to be on the front page” list that users than cherry pick what they do or don’t see from. Reddit’s “front page” doesn’t update nearly as often, it feels like, either. I got now at 11:45pm and see stuff in the same place it was at around 2pm today. It makes it feel far less “up to date.” I keep finding myself going to the individual subreddits, where the listing is far more logical, hoping to see something new. Although this isn’t ideal, I can understand the appeal. It’s more concise this way. The problem is reddit’s so ugly and poorly designed (navigation specifically), if I want to follow a large number of subreddits, I have to either click thru to the listing of subreddits and then open each of them individually, or make a firefox bookmarks folder with all of them so I can click the “open all in new tabs” thing. Either way it’s kind of ridiculous having to do that. The top bar that lists all of them is nice for someone who follows a short list of sub’s, but once there are more than my browser’s window sizes allows I have to thru extra steps to see them all.
It’s also obvious reddit’s far more involved in the discussion surrounding the news than the news itself. I’m not against this, I support the idea, I just don’t care to get in the discussion. On digg I commented sometimes, making random little comments I thought where funny, but I never paid attention to what random people have to say. That doesn’t mean that these discussions are invalid to me, it’s just I’m more concerned with the news itself, and seeing it in an orderly and timely fashion. If I want to talk about things then I talk about them with people I know.
Although I can dig what reddit is doing (pun moderately intended), and now that I’ve actually played with it more seriously, I at least am not adverse to using it. However, it doesn’t fill the void that digg v4 leaves behind with it’s new layout and design decisions. I don’t think there’s any other serious contenders, and I’m too lazy to go out and actually follow all of these sites myself.
Anyways, I give it a couple months until some other internet asshole that actually feels motivated crops up with something much like the older digg, and another year before it’s popular enough that it’s up/down voting system is reliable…
