Readers who’ve been on board with Broadcasting Brain for awhile know that I’ve written a bit about Digg and StumbleUpon, among other sites. In fact, I was a pretty avid Digger for a number of months and have spent a fair bit of time on Mixx, Reddit and a few other sites. I put that on hiatus back in March of this year and haven’t been very active on any of those sites except StumbleUpon of late.

I feel a bit guilty about walking away from social news. I mean, I was out there hustling stories and begging for votes and trying to call in favors and… all the normal social news stuff, actually. Then I dropped it, probably leaving a bunch of people who wanted my votes.

Here’s the thing(s):

  • I had to acknowledge to myself that I was voting for some stuff that I really didn’t care much about. EDIT: SilentJay74 would refer to this as CLAV Syndrome or CLAV virus.
  • I did accomplish one of my Digg goals (getting into the Top 1000), but I had to look at the time I was spending doing that and what I was accomplishing.
  • Related to the above, my blogging and other writing was suffering.
  • Seeing how Digg had been handling their user relations was getting discouraging.
  • The quality of popular material on Digg wasn’t meeting my information needs.
  • I didn’t feel that I was getting enough enjoyment or important new information by focusing on social news
  • Microblogging and lifestreaming began to take up time, too.

I’m thinking about getting back into social news again, but I really find that that my time and focus required for social news is the same as blogging, so one will probably always suffer in respect to the other.

In general I think that Mixx might be the best match for me and my interests, although I don’t feel that I’ve really given Propeller a fair shake. I do know that Mixx has really done a lot of good work to their site over the past year and in terms of functionality, responsiveness, and community it’s pretty darn hard to top.

It’s funny how I started in social media as a sort of content producer, then got into social news to try to promote my stuff, then became a somewhat serious blogger, and now I’m pondering social news again.

I used to aspire to having one of my blog posts hit Digg’s front page, but over the past few months I’ve come to accept the fact that my blogging isn’t really the type of stuff that goes popular on Digg. That doesn’t bother me either. I’m growing my audience here, mainly through organic growth and networking, and that seems to be paying off for me.

I think I’m ready to approach social news the way one really should: as a means to find stories that you like and to support them, instead of trying to build up an ultra-profile on one of those sites. It’s a great and fun hobby, but really, the value in social media is in the relationships you build, not in the tiny skirmishes and victories of story popularity.

EDIT:  it can be a bit difficult to turn away from social news when it can be a source of blog ideas, but it’s always there waiting to be read.

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