Stealing the web’s precious, bodily fluids
July 14, 2007 – 3:42 amRaganwald argues that link-voting sites (Digg, reddit, et. al.) hurt the web by locking comment threads into proprietary databases, depriving the web of some of its vital webness. I would agree, except:
- I’ve always found Digg and reddit comment threads function as contests to see who makes the best joke, and this they do well enough. For serious discussion, they are almost always useless, so I turn to the source’s comments.
- Slashdot is a pretty strong counterexample. Whereas Digg and reddit comments are largely dominated by immature people, the Slashdot community is dominated by knowledgeable and insightful immature people. The only thing I really dislike about Slashdot threads are all the people complaining about Slashdot dupes, Slashdot story quality, the Slashdot moderation system, and Slashdot comment threads.
- Many links don’t point to blogs but rather to ‘heavier’ sites, like newspapers. I never read nor contribute to the comment threads of such sites: if it isn’t a WordPress blog or something near like, I ain’t going to bother with your crappy commenting registration process and interface. So in those cases, Slashdot, Digg, and reddit provide a forum that in my mind wouldn’t otherwise really exist.
Now as it happens, I’ve had an idea of late of how to create a decentralized Digg-like system using RSS feeds. I leave it as an exercise to you to imagine how this would work (hint: there are no centralized feeds; everyone sees their own personalized collation of received items; while not exactly the same thing as Digg, I believe this actually has some important advantages for the user). Oh, and I call the system Panoptikon (with a ‘k’ because the closest domain I could get was panoptikon.org)*.
* If you’re that one crazy person who actually follows my blog, you remember ‘Panopticon’ is the name I gave to another proposed idea. Yes, I’m re-purposing the name, as I believe it fits this idea better.
2 Responses to “Stealing the web’s precious, bodily fluids”
First, I’m looking forward to seeing Panoptikon!
Second, it sounds like you are saying, “I agree, but here’s why it doesn’t matter,” then showing that most comments on those sites are pure drudge.
I think you’re right about the drudge, but so is most of the web as well (Sturgeon’s Revelation). The beauty of an open web is that we have tools to find the good stuff amongst the drudge. The tyranny of walled gardens is that someone else can restrict our access to the good stuff.
For example, most reddit commentary is drudge. But people sometimes link to relevant Wikipedia articles or academic papers in those comments.
Good search engines can use those links to provide context. Unless reddit decides one day to provide their own search and block external search.
Anyhoo, not that big a deal. It’s far more important that people build better tools, which is why I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
Thanks for the follow up!
By Reg Braithwaite on Jul 14, 2007
That’s a fair assessment of my stance, though i was really being sincere when I said I value Slashdot comments.
I think what distinguishes Slashdot from Digg and Reddit is mainly that Slashdot retains its original specialist community whereas Digg and Reddit quickly became sites without portfolio. You can see this within Reddit: programming.reddit is not so trashy as main reddit. Whereas the Slashdot community is happily insular, Digg/Reddit submitters largely consist of sub-communities attempting to grab the attention of the wider community. This is one important thing which saves most of Wikipedia from excess: there aren’t too many central points with an audience of receptive eyeballs, so the crackpots at least get mostly sorted out into their own corners, or they at least get diluted.
By Brian Will on Jul 14, 2007