The state of the Internet
You might have noticed that the quality of postings to sites like Digg, del.icio.us, and Reddit declines very quickly and people start to rant about it.
Don’t read on if you dislike unqualified rants.
For example over at Reddit is a conversation about the quality and “always the same articles” phenomenon.
Others blame the voting system of Digg and draw the conclusion that nothing controversial ever stays at the frontpage. Shortly after reading his thoughts, I found this articles which practically doesn’t teach anyone anything new, but got quite a lot of Diggs (>1500 the last time I checked).
It is pretty much the same with del.icio.us’ popular page, at the beginning one could find quite a lot of interesting stuff there, but quickly the articles were all the same. Just like Reddit and Digg replaced the popular page of del.icio.us for me, others will replace Reddit and Digg with “better” or more interesting content.
The problem, if we believe Kathy Sierra in The Dumbness of Crowds, is that each person has individual interests and views onto the world. If a community-based service like Digg and Reddit average the input of all the people, they smooth out the sharp edges which renders most of the content uninteresting.
Digg has problems with users canceling each other out (burry), Reddit promotes quite a lot of junk to the frontpage and is pretty America-biased, but provides a Recommended section with articles possibly interesting to me/you1. Del.icio.us shows the articles interesting to a lot of people on its popular page (like CSS and JavaScript tricks), but one doesn’t search the internet for things everybody knows. Of course I can filter the populars by any tag I want, but if I knew what I search I would consult Google.
There are other approaches to filter interesting articles for us – like TechMeme and MetaFilter, but both fail to appeal me.
Why bother anyway?
The question is, why do I (or we) care about these junk-news anyway? Is it really that important? According to an article I found at Reddit, The age of technological revolution is 100 years dead, we didn’t produce anything of importance for the past 100 years (the article ended up with 20 points at Reddit, where a video of a shark got 499 points… hmmm).
I think we’d be better off by reading books (edited quality content – most of the time), instead of searching for the ultimate truth on community-news sites. Somehow they are like some tabloids or yellow papers, no wonder so many people like it but rant about others reading pretty much the same content on paper (for example e-Media in Austria).
I guess it’s hipp to use Digg and Reddit, to show the world your bookmarks on del.icio.us, and to tell the world about your personal thoughts in a blog. Obiously I’m a bit sick of all that Web 2.0 and community bul***it, maybe I got too much of it lately.
1 Based on the votes of users with a similar voting pattern – as far as I understand their approach.
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I have a limited intelligence, and I have used it in a particular direction. —Richard P. Feynman
