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How Digg Gets Everything Backwards.. And How to Fix It

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housetier:
A very good point!  :up:

I can't say much now, not before I have given it more thought...

mouser:
perhaps the main difference in this case is that no one cares enough what is at top of forum thread list, so there isn't much incentive to "game the system".

also, threads only get "bumped" when they are "replied to", which means that its obvious who is bumping threads, and only real forum users ever reply to a thread; so there is no effect where threads are bumped based on their catchy titles, etc.

urlwolf:
I think dc may have one of the highest signal-to-noise ratio on the web. Some forum posts are long and ellaborate.

Hmm, maybe someone could do some research on what is behing that. Maybe forums as CMS are just better? Maybe it's the project management by mouser?

app103:
maybe it's the quality of membership here  ;)

JavaJones:
So you want to recreate Slashdot? ;) Seriously, the only difference there is the "domain expert" focus - how you define these experts and how they are assigned/elected. On Slashdot it's purely a social thing, there appears to be no other merit involved, but there's nothing to say that a similar election by the general public wouldn't get you the George Bush of content editors. Oops, got a little political there, sorry. ;)

Ok, so I like the idea of turning things on their head, but isn't this how a lot of sites already work? Isn't what people are excited about with Digg the fact that "the people" have more direct control? So even if you did successfully create such a site and the content were "better" (is this measurable?), would anyone really care?

I'm still curious whether a true example of this model already exists. I suspect it does, or darn close to it. Slashdot is actually pretty close, as I mentioned. Again the main differentiator is the definition of experts at the filter/editor level. If an even closer example can be found, I think the measure of its success might be instructive in this argument.

Then the question becomes: what is the goal of your site? Is it a place for a lot of smart people to enjoy quality stories, but not necessarily to attract "the masses"? If so I think that's a realistic goal. But you will inevitably be dealing with a minority and this includes your submitting body of general visitors. To really get the proper aggregate you'd need to attract more public interest, but can you do that without the Digg draw, the MySpace draw? The reason all of these sites are big - despite their glaring flaws (and I fully acknowledge them) - is people like to be told their important and given some level of power to show it (MySpace customization, for example). So what would be done with this proposed site to get people's interest and show its value over Digg to the average person? Once again this is much less of an issue if the average person is not the audience.

Just remember that Average Joe seems pretty happy with Digg so really what you're trying to do is convince people that the "exciting, hip, new "unbiased", people-driven way of finding news" is wrong, and that's hard work. :D This is not a fundamentally wrong concept, it's just fighting against human nature IMO. I would love to be convinced otherwise!

- Oshyan

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