I can’t count the number of times I’ve told someone about how much I love Digg and Reddit. Digg v4 is going to be very cool and decrease the amount of stories I skip, hopefully. This new version seems Twitter inspired and as such I hope that this new version comes with a option to automatically Digg follow/friend/whatever your Twitter/ Facebook friends.
This doesn’t address my issue with Digg, which is also why I still use Reddit. Digg has something like 40 million users, but its bent more towards trivial interests rather than actual news for adults. Reddit does a better job of this. Even Digg Nation, which I love, does maybe 1 story a week that is real news and the rest is BS to be frank. Maybe Digg doesn’t feel like its their job, but its a wasted opportunity. They could be helping to move conversations forward and instead, they’re too good at distracting us. Even the concept of a Digg is unclear. Are we digging because we agree or because it was a good submission/comment.
In the future I hope to see 2 things.
1) A reduction in redundancy. There has to be someway to look at 2 stories and say these 2 stories are looking at the same link or even better, Digg has the potential to be the go to news site if it helped to evolve the way that we have conversations on the internet. Right now, there is a stream of comments that can get very long, be very unfocused, and thus makes for useless data outside of the fact that people are interested.
2) The goal of comments, at least on the news, should be to make points and subpoints and see how people agree overall. On some stories there will be several different points of contention, and some things where we all agree. The reason why people aren’t that interested in the news is because the feedback mechanisms suck. The news is presented and the message boards are dominated by humor, but if you could engage in a conversation with the public at large and/or section off just your friends, but be generating concensus which is regularly obfuscated by the major media outlets and then have that concensus broadcast it would be very powerful, you would have a very powerful tool. I’d like to see a Digg Nation or Digg Reel format on politics and business that presented the big stories of the week, “55% of diggers want to get out of Iraq ASAP, 20% want to wait til they have a stable government, …”, some discussion format.
I’m not saying I want polls. Polls suck because they usually box people in in a way that oversimplifies or limits people’s ability to express what part they agree or disagree with. Maybe there could be smart polls that evolve as a position is better stated so that all the people that want the voted age reduced to 16 for example, can tag their comment as such. If you get the most diggs of the people that support a position, you should be the standard bearer for it.
Digg has the potential to be the Facebook of news, a layer that everybody goes through to get news because it is the best way to interact with it. Right now its just a cool website that plugs in to other sites. I think it would change Digg from being a site people enjoy from time to time, to the main center for news across the internet.
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http://youtu.be/Y9rc-Ou6814