Marco.org

May 16 2008 ∞
I saw this widget on a blog tonight. Nine of the ten stories are list posts — useless “10 best”, “10 worst”, “10 scariest”, “10 biggest” posts made for Digg-bait and quick skimming. List posts are the McDonald’s of online writing: they require no thought, provide no intellectual value, and guarantee lots of cheap traffic and comments. I can hardly even listen to Diggnation anymore, previously one of my favorite podcasts, because the “stories” are so inane and useless. This is every Diggnation episode now: (long intro, description of this episode’s alcohol) “Hey, here’s a funny video about cats!” “Guy gets hit in the crotch with lightsaber by 5-year-old” (commercials) (stupid emails) Digg’s current state of affairs is just sad. They’ve hit a wall of mediocrity and community isolation. I can’t imagine that their traffic is growing significantly. All attempts to broaden Digg’s appeal have failed — the fundamental idea simply doesn’t scale beyond a single narrow userbase. They can’t go anywhere else with this. No wonder they’re trying to sell it. They know it’s time to move on.

I saw this widget on a blog tonight.

Nine of the ten stories are list posts — useless “10 best”, “10 worst”, “10 scariest”, “10 biggest” posts made for Digg-bait and quick skimming. List posts are the McDonald’s of online writing: they require no thought, provide no intellectual value, and guarantee lots of cheap traffic and comments.

I can hardly even listen to Diggnation anymore, previously one of my favorite podcasts, because the “stories” are so inane and useless. This is every Diggnation episode now:

  • (long intro, description of this episode’s alcohol)
  • “Hey, here’s a funny video about cats!”
  • “Guy gets hit in the crotch with lightsaber by 5-year-old”
  • (commercials)
  • (stupid emails)

Digg’s current state of affairs is just sad. They’ve hit a wall of mediocrity and community isolation. I can’t imagine that their traffic is growing significantly. All attempts to broaden Digg’s appeal have failed — the fundamental idea simply doesn’t scale beyond a single narrow userbase. They can’t go anywhere else with this.

No wonder they’re trying to sell it. They know it’s time to move on.

Creative Commons License All original content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 U.S. License except that which is quoted from elsewhere or attributed to others. In short, you may reproduce, reblog, and modify my content, but you must provide proper attribution.