Broadcasting Brain

Digg, the quintessential social news website, used to occupy a lot of my online hours for a number of months in 2007 and early 2008. I managed to break myself of that addiction well over six months ago and, although I will Digg stories occasionally, I don’t go there for any other reason that to look around, shake my head, and then bounce out. Digg lacks… a lot. Mainly it lacks a compelling reason for me to spend my time there.

Digg seemed like the great crowdsourcing prototype in action, where news stories entered a gigantic channel of news through small streams and stories could get Dugg, or voted on, pushing them into mass public view. At various times this has promised tens of thousands of views to the lucky website whose page got voted into popularity. There’s no doubt that this functionality has been exploited by people who wanted the page views.

But the rules kept changing, much like Google’s Page Ranking formulas seem to change regularly. Suddenly it was hard to get a story to front page: about twice as hard as before. Then, just as suddenly, it seemed to be a piece of cake to make a story popular. Then, again, not. You could almost hear the brain cells overheating as the engineers behind the scenes tried to eliminate gaming by introducing new functionality that came very close to gaming Digg anyway.

A recommendation engine appeared, supposedly to help us find cool new stuff. Maybe I was well out of the honeymoon phase with the site when the engine appeared, but I never found it to be terribly useful or helpful. I also found the Upcoming section of Digg more cumbersome to work with after the engine was implemented. Lacking.

Digg initiated a town hall concept in 2008 which, frankly, was lacking. Lacking, I say, because very little was unscripted, IMHO, despite how Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose seemed to be playing it casual - nothing terrible new, useful, or unexpected came out of it. Meanwhile, to my knowledge, no meaningful online means for Digg users to communicate with Digg management ever appeared. Lacking.

Digg as a source of news? Well… you can certainly find good stuff there, but between my RSS subscriptions and use of other news sites (including MSM news sites, actually), I don’t find a compelling reason to go to Digg for news. The likelihood of finding something interesting in that information stream after scanning through a lot of much less interesting stuff: low. Lacking.

Then there’s the bannings. Digg users, some with long tenure who have added a lot of notoriety and value to the site (including one of the co-hosts of The Drill Down), have been booted for questionable or, well, lacking reasons. Reasons that lack sufficient explanation or logic. Lacking.

Meanwhile, Digg continues to raise new funds, despite what appears to be some failed opportunities to sell the company, and plans more international expansion. Well, you know, that’s actually pretty cool and I wish them good luck with that. However, that success comes on the backs of its most active users, who provided the content that helps drive the monetization models behind this whole thing. And so a number of these more active members have been banned. Will more rise up in their place? Probably. But it seems to me that it would have made a lot more sense to try to work more with them. Naive, I may be, but other companies in the Web 2.0 model seem to be doing much better at having positive, more directly engaged relations with their user base.

And, to me, that’s what’s really lacking. C’mon, Digg, you can do better.

This post is being published on Oct. 12, at the same time as other Digg-related posts are being published. Social News Central has more information, if you’d like to check it out.

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An incredibly intense, thorough, and insidious program has been perpetrated upon the world’s youth. They’ve been indoctrinated, experienced false and unrealistic expectations, and they are being set up for a great shock.

But it’s time to expose the truth and reveal everything for the world to see.

These unwitting victims of this nefarious plot are about to reach a moment of truth. It will rock them to their core when they find out what’s happened. Their lives will never be the same.

Horrible, isn’t it?

Oh, the injustice!

But wait.

There’s still hope.

You can help.

Keep reading, here’s where you come in.

The massive fraud is culminating at around this time of year. So be ready. There will be many victims.

Just so you can prepare, I’ll let you know what this shocking event is. Forewarned is forearmed. Right?

Ready?

Set?

Sure?

OK.

Here t’is.

And here’s a SPOILER alert just in case…

:::::: SPOILER :::::::

This shocking catalyst of the horrible revelation to come is called…

GRADUATION DAY!

And what is this horrible hoax?

That their education is now complete.

The truth?

Their education is JUST STARTING IN EARNEST.

And?

IT NEVER ENDS!!!

And how do you help the poor victims cope?

Simple.

You tell them the truth.

That the best is yet to come. That there’s always more to explore, more to see, more to do, and more to learn.

It’s one of the privileges of being alive.

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.