Today has been somewhat of an interesting day. I decided to sleep in this morning and woke up to a pleasant surprise as I sifted through my RSS feeds: Emily’s piece on Dating An Apple Developer was picked up as a front page story on Digg.
In summary, Emily wrote that post about me last summer was I was working on an entry for the Rails Day contest. As I sat there working, she sat on my laptop and wrote that piece. I enjoyed it immensely, and so did others as it was picked up on del.icio.us and blogs all over the world. unfortunately, there are some sites that don’t understand what writing with tongue firmly in cheek is. That seems to be the readers of Digg.
Digg was founded by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne and Dan Rice. You may recognize Rose if you ever watched TechTV/G4TV’s The Screen Savers or Attack of the Show. He is also a contributor to Leo Laporte’s This Week In Tech and produces several videocasts like Diggnation and Systm.
In it’s FAQ, Digg describes itself as follows:
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.
Digg has become the breading ground for fans of Rose (he was a former host on TechTV) and other technology enthusiasts. The site has been live for a little over a year, and has already gained a following that allows it to cripple Web servers like mine: at last count there were over 80,000 users and that was doubling every quarter. When a story arrives on the front page of Digg, your bandwidth bill will rise. Think of it as the [Slashdot Effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect” title=”Slashdot Effect ) 2.0
The New Slashdot
Last month, Robert Andrews wrote the following on Wired:
Critics also say Digg is more chaotic than Slashdot, which often features more technical, detailed conversations. But Digg, with its tight weblog integration and Flickr-like reliance on the collective efforts of its members, is pointing the way to a new wave of socially assembled news initiatives, organized and made sense of by readers themselves.
The problem with this socially assembled news initiative is that most of the editors users of Digg are merely sixteen year old males gathering to leave their cynical and oftentimes hurtful commentary on any story or situation. There is no moderation, save for the ability for the sites overseers to delete comments marked as problematic (which happened in my instance). People are able to freely post short, snide comments with no sort of fact checking or consequence. On Slashdot, trolling and/or inaccurate comments can get moderated down so that the site is viewable with some sort of sanity.
Another point is that Slashdot features a crowd of users that range from the obsessed Linux geek to the regular technology enthusiast, Digg users find interest in more sane, and less technical, subject matter. Compare the top stories on both sites and you will see what I mean. When was the last time Slashdot posted a story about how great TechTV was?
And as one Digg user put it in the comments of Emily’s digg:
This Digg submission perfectly illustrates exactly what separates Digg from Slashdot. We date, and in fact have females posting here. Slashdot people are actually proud of being low-lives with horrible hygiene and no real-life friends.
Yet Digg user is the one posting snide comments about other Web site users on a Sunday morning?
The main point of this entry, though, is to point out what the problem with sites like Digg is: their users ruin the fun for everyone. I subscribe to Digg’s top stories because there is a gem in there every now and then. I couldn’t care less about the majority of the content posted on the site. Rarely do I go to the comments and post something, but today I was just irked.
Below are some of the things said about Emily and myself. In most instances they are direct copy/paste quotations, but some have been taken from my memory because the original comment was deleted.
Things Said About Emily
“Love is indeed blind. How could she bear him with all these flaws she pointed out? Oh! It is that monthly check from Apple!”
“You are just not as attractive as you think you are.”
“that girl must be desperate, he’d probably be just as happy with a blow up doll..or a man”
“I can’t believe someone would put up with an asshole like this Justin”
The Things Said About Me
“Wow, her developer boyfriend sounds like a pathetic peice of shit, that’s for sure”
“haha he is going to get shit from his friends (if he has any) about this for a long time”
“clearly some genetic flaws in this gene pool. I can’t wait to see the kids”
“She has confused geek with “emotionally crippled freak”…easy mistake really.”
“I live for a prepackaged lifestyle and appearances as a stupid Mac user”
“I know some geeks that don’t check out women, and they’re gay.”
On the subject of the homosexual comment (since deleted), one Digg user even went into Emily’s Flickr photostream to pull these two photos of me as proof of my homosexuality. In the first one I am with Emily’s brother before his prom making a stupid pose as I tend to do. Obviously when you have your arms around another man, you are a homosexual: at least on Digg.
And then this picture of me holding a pink shirt that my sister purchased me last Christmas (and I even returned because I wasn’t a big fan of it). According to Digg, wearing pink means you are a homosexual. I am glad we have Digg to give us tips of culture and fashion. I don’t know where I’d be without it!
Ooooooh yeah! Digg It?
Emily and I went to lunch this afternoon with some friends (yes, I have them, and no they haven’t made fun of me) and we told this this tail and had a good laugh about this morning’s events. You see, most people understand what satire and humor is. I suppose they don’t teach that sort of writing in high school these days. I know I learned it when I took sophomore English.
I thought MySpace was bad, but Digg just joined the ranks of Internet cesspools. Until they can enact some moderation to deal with the TechTV 16-year-old crowd, the site will never grow to take over Slashdot. The site received VC money a few months ago that will enable it to go forward with some of the plans it has in place. Venture capital does not guarantee success as we saw in early 2000 when the bubble burst. Will Digg’s bubble burst in five years? I dunno. Hopefully they will spend that VC money wisely and maybe focus on making the site more about the stories and less about the snarky comments.
I guess the main reason I wanted to post this was to show how right Mena Trott was last week at Les Blogs when she gave a speech on civility in the blogosphere. Mena said:
When I started to think about what I wanted to speak about today, the phrase “civility in blogging” kept on popping into my head. When I say “civility in blogging,” I’m basically referring to the demeanor or the desired demeanor that we conduct ourselves when we’re blogging. Civility is a difficult concept to speak about without sounding preachy or condemning. I don’t want to give a lecture today on civility — God only knows that my coworkers would laugh to hear me talk about politeness. Instead of lecturing, I really just have a simple question: Can we as bloggers be more civil?
Yes, we can be more civil. Digg it?
Update: Apparently Emily’s mom died and I skipped her funeral. I never knew!
“Wait your girlfriends mom dies and you continue to code? WTF is wrong with this guy?”
