I am becoming increasingly irritated with Digg. The amount of misinformation that gets spread on that site is appalling and makes me wonder if we aren't better off having some editor at CNN or the New York Times or even Slashdot tell us what's newsworthy (or at the very least true).
Who's the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?
What it boils down to is desperation to get on the front page or a simple lack of reading comprehension. In a little over a week, I've come across four stories purporting rumors as fact. Despite the fact that other people notice this as well (and make it known in the comments), the story still ends up with a couple thousand Diggs. In roughly the same period of time, I've heard two people spread these rumors as facts to other people, who may or may not be Diggers, and so on, and the misinformation propagates.
If an idiot throws a rock into the water, not even 50 geniuses can fish it out.
When I come across these stories, I'll bury them as inaccurate. I like to think others do too. But the story keeps climbing. Is anything done after people bury stories? They just turn gray in my news list, but I don't really care. I already know the story sucks. It's already possible to "digg down" a user comment, why aren't we afforded the same "luxury" with stories? As far as comments are concerned, 98% of them are trash. There's no intelligent discussion because the inmates are running the asylum. Calacanis had it right, there needs to be some sort of moderation team out there dealing with the mountains of crap.
So Scoble wonders why Digg's audience hasn't grown much. I feel it's because Digg isn't a serious site. I go to Digg to pass the time, not to find late-breaking news. I figure most people on Digg do the same and the quality of the community reflects it. Perhaps I expected more from the Digg community, but I've grown increasingly disappointed with the quality of stories that appear on the site. And that's where the Digg problem lies: in the world of user-generated content, if the users are subpar then the content they generate will (for the most part) be subpar as well.
So what else is out there in the land of social news? Maybe it's time to try out the Facebook Google Reader app (what Scoble calls, "Digg for the smart people"). Still, I'd like something that's a bit more open (and doesn't require me logging into Facebook).
[tags]Digg, social news, user generated content,
