Slashdot VS digg

Thursday, January 12th, 2006

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how Digg.com will be the new slashdot , whereby Slashdot.org receives a lot of complaints and Digg.com receives a lot of praise. Most of these are comming from the Digg camp. There’s a article on The Guardian right now prematurely talking about Slashdot’s demise.

“Slashdot will take years to die,” Jeremy Zawodny, a respected engineer at Yahoo says. But he thinks sites such as Digg and Reddit offer something Slashdot can’t: the ability for readers collectively to pick stories they think are interesting, generating a community feel and a sense of power. At Slashdot, started in 1997, stories are chosen by a team of editors.
I’ve visited digg.com on occasion. It’s similar in content to a number of sites; mostly a mix of Slashdot.org, Geekpress.com and many sites that just post links to ‘funny’ stuff. The volume of ‘stories’ is high; much higher than most sites I know (except for FreshMeat.net). The links are generally pretty good, though I’ve seen some pretty bad ones hit the front page. But will it be the new Slashdot? I don’t think so.

The whole Digg.com hype-Slashdot bashing reminds me very much of the situation with another site..Kuro5hin.org. Kuro5hin too has a fairly large anti-slashdot gathering and they too believe themselves to be oh-so-better than Slashdot. Just like with Digg.com, I’ve also visited Kuro5hin for a while in the past. Just like with Digg.com, I didn’t stay around for long. Instead of focussing on their own little corners of the Internet, they’re more obsessed with beating Slashdot.org.

Let’s take a look at what Slashdot’s got to offer and what are some common complaints about Slashdot.

Slashdot

Pro’s:

• Quality stories.
  Sure, there are dupes (duplicate stories) now and then, but the general quality of not just the contents Slashdot links too, but also the summaries is, and has been for years, very high.
• Fairly decent volume of stories.
  Not too little; not too much.
• Stories that spark discussions
  Slashdot summaries of stories often try to spark discussions.
• Excellent discussion system
  Slashdot’s discussion system is top-notch. Nothing gets even close. The threaded replying, the score-based browsing, the easy navigation… Slashdot’s got years of experience with high-volume discussions and it shows in their discussion system.
• Excellent moderation system
  Slashdot’s moderating system is simply the best. Again, nothing beats it. Good posts float to the top – bad stories become invisible.
• Excellent crowd of posters with insightful, interesting and funny comments.
  This is of course mostly due to Slashdot’s incredible moderation system, but still. There are some very, very smart people on Slashdot. People with real oppinions and real knowledge.
• Fair amount of self-ridicule amongst posters.
  I absolutely detest a community that rates itself highly.
• Character
  I don’t know how to explain this one.. Slashdot simply has character. Where else would you find a post like this?
• Geek journalism
  Slashdot isn’t just about posting links to interesting stories, it’s also a form of journalism. Mostly by the commenters.
• News.
  Not just a big linkdump.
• Acceptable volume
  Slashdot has an acceptable volume of stories. I don’t like having my RSS feed reader getting spammed with stories.

Con’s:

• Dupes
  Duplicate stories are a problem on slashdot, according to its visitors. It has never really bothered me much, I hardly notice them even though the volume of stories isn’t that high. Besides, the insightful discussions make even the dupes valuable.
• Unselected stories
  Story submitters often complain about their stories not being accepted and posted to the frontpage. They especially complain when a different submitter with the same story does get accepted.
• Slashvertisements
  Some stories at times seem to be little more than an advertisement for a product.
• Linkwhores
  There are many complaints about story submitters who abuse the backlink Slashdot provides to a page of their choice when their stories are selected. Many argue that linkspammers, who simply submit many many stories and get a fair number of them accepted, are abusing this backlink to get impressions for their site. Slashdot even ran an editorial on the problem.

Digg.com

Pro’s:

• High volume
  Digg’s pretty high volume, which is nice if you’re bored. (Also see the con’s on this).
• Generally good links
  The gross of the links on Digg are interesting to me, which is good.

Con’s

• High volume
  (Also see con’s). Digg’s pretty high volume which is good, but it’s also annoying because it completely spams my RSS feed reader (which lists story in chronological order, not per site). The volume of the links also has an effect on their quality
• No editors
  Digg.com doesn’t have editors. This makes their stories little more than links to other articles. The quality of the stories also suffers from this. For instance, you’ll never find a link to one of those extremely annoying ‘funny’ movies. The relevance of the stories isn’t garantueed. Slashdot is “news for nerds, stuff that matters”. Though Slashdot often carries stories I don’t find interesting, they’ve at least been consistent for years in what they post. Digg.com posts too much bullshit about Ajax and a whole lot of other stuff that I’d much rather read from on a site devoted to such topics. This will never change on Digg.com; it will only get worse as it becomes more populair.
• Incomprehensible front-page
  Digg’s front-page is incomprehensible, story wise. I still haven’t figured out what makes a story get to the front-page, what makes it stay there and what determines the order in which they appear. It’s not chronological and it also doesn’t seem to be score related. Since their RSS feed mirrors their front-page, I can’t use their RSS feed (since my feed reader combines all the feeds in a chronological order).
• Worthless comment system.
  Flat commenting systems suck. ‘Nuff said.
• Worthless commenters
  Digg commenters are generally very annoying. The noise-to-signal ratio is so high that it isn’t just not worth reading or joining the discussions, it actually annoys me. Maybe this is because of their (non-existing?) moderation system, I don’t know.
• Moderation?
  Does digg even have moderation?
• Link dump
  Digg.com is nothing more than a link dumping site of which there are enough already.
• Envyous users
  Slashdot-bashing users and stories degrade Digg’s quality significantly. The users seem to be full of themselves, digg.com and digg.com’s founder(s).

In short, I don’t think Digg.com will be the new Slashdot. I don’t think Digg.com will replace Slashdot either. Both seem to serve very different purposes, even though the site owners seem to think differently. Digg is a high-volume tech-oriented link dump blog, ‘for the people, by the people’. Slashdot is “news for Nerds; stuff that matters”, complete with brilliant discussions.