Shameful Human(s) of the Week: Now it’s just the entire Digg community
Last week, I declared Kevin Rose, the founder of social media/link sharing site Digg.com and the entire community of that site to be Shameful Humans. I blamed Kevin and his staff for prematurely pushing out v4 while it was still packed with glitches and absent in obvious features, and I blamed the community of Digg for completely overreacting to the changes brought about.
In the intervening week, Digg’s tech has stabilized, things are getting fixed, and Rose appears to be moving forward. The community of his site, however, is not. Each day, I fire up Digg with the hopes of finding amusement and maybe even a story or two to cover on the site, the things I used to find. Instead, what my browser displays each morning is a user-generated catastrophe of nerd rage.
Every anti-Digg and anti-Rose post that can be found is popularized and pushed to the front-page. Significantly worse, the frothing geeks who continue to visit Digg, even though they claim to hate it, see to it that no conversation within any comment section can take place unless it is specifically about how bad the new Digg is.
As anti-v4 push-back continues, it has become increasingly shrill and conspiratorial, with users now claiming sites like Mashable and TIME pay Rose to promote their content. This of course ignores the fact that these users have managed to entirely bend Digg’s system to their will, in direct violation of corporate interest. Someone, somewhere has to be Digging up those stories in order popularize them. Where users used to follow other users, they now more often follow websites, and some sites have managed to work the system better than others. That’s it.
Never have I more greatly appreciated the diligent work of moderators on the forums I visit. If this were any forum on the internet, such users would be banned for trolling, trashing, and abusing the site they are participating in. At a certain point, Digg is going to have to boot these unruly abusers in order to be able to provide any kind of service at all, save as venting ground for unwarranted rage.
Digg has been rendered unusable, not by its leadership, not by the corporate masters the company has supposedly bowed to, but by its own community of spammers who have seemingly nothing else to do than ruin a perfectly good service for everyone else.
Recent Comments