Is digg the new slashdot?
As time goes by we always seem to improve our tools. For years I've looked almost daily at slashdot (or slash). I can recall talking to friends and co-workers about dozens of times about references to stories that appear there and pointing out comments and stories that I had posted there. But over the past several months I've started hearing and reading more about digg. Looking at both today I think I figured out what's going on here.
From the first glance digg comes across a lot cleaner than slashdot. These days about a third of the screen space at slashdot is dedicated to advertising. digg runs a leader board type ad from Google right across the front of the page. Both sites feature a frame down the right side of the page. slashdot completely fills this with ads and content from other sites. slash also has a menu down the right side of the screen that displays the various categories that your user profile says you are interested in. The problem I have with slash is that the categories they have defined seem to all still be there. Categories that made sense 4 or 5 years ago are still there.
Look at the differences in content. digg and slash both covered a recent story about "safe cigarettes" based on a story that appeared in the UK Times Online. digg had the story submitted very late on Saturday night. It was categorized at digg under "science" and gathered 26 "diggs" and 2 comments as of this writing (on 6 PM Sunday evening). slash posted the story on Sunday afternoon just after 2:30, about 14 hours later. At slashdot there were a total of 357 comments to this article. Based on my profile setting a little over a hundred were under the threshold of being displayed.
What's the difference? At digg I didn't even see this story because given it's rating not many people "dugg" it (found it interesting enough to read). At digg the comments were simple and to the point; one was "I'm glad I quit" while the other one could be summarized as "we all know that smoking is bad". At slash the comments were all over the place. And the ratings of the comments was in my opinion just stupid. One comment was titled "We need deadlier cigarettes" and suggested that cigarettes be 100 times more lethal. That comment was scored a 5 (highest rating) and deemed "funny". And there were another 24 comments listed in this same "We need deadlier cigarettes" thread.
Am I going to stop reading slash? Probably not. I will be looking at digg more often.
From the first glance digg comes across a lot cleaner than slashdot. These days about a third of the screen space at slashdot is dedicated to advertising. digg runs a leader board type ad from Google right across the front of the page. Both sites feature a frame down the right side of the page. slashdot completely fills this with ads and content from other sites. slash also has a menu down the right side of the screen that displays the various categories that your user profile says you are interested in. The problem I have with slash is that the categories they have defined seem to all still be there. Categories that made sense 4 or 5 years ago are still there.
Look at the differences in content. digg and slash both covered a recent story about "safe cigarettes" based on a story that appeared in the UK Times Online. digg had the story submitted very late on Saturday night. It was categorized at digg under "science" and gathered 26 "diggs" and 2 comments as of this writing (on 6 PM Sunday evening). slash posted the story on Sunday afternoon just after 2:30, about 14 hours later. At slashdot there were a total of 357 comments to this article. Based on my profile setting a little over a hundred were under the threshold of being displayed.
What's the difference? At digg I didn't even see this story because given it's rating not many people "dugg" it (found it interesting enough to read). At digg the comments were simple and to the point; one was "I'm glad I quit" while the other one could be summarized as "we all know that smoking is bad". At slash the comments were all over the place. And the ratings of the comments was in my opinion just stupid. One comment was titled "We need deadlier cigarettes" and suggested that cigarettes be 100 times more lethal. That comment was scored a 5 (highest rating) and deemed "funny". And there were another 24 comments listed in this same "We need deadlier cigarettes" thread.
Am I going to stop reading slash? Probably not. I will be looking at digg more often.
