When I first saw digg.com, I thought, hey, cool. Neat links. As time has gone on, though, it’s seemed more and more useless to me.
Whatever is of passing interest to me on the front page of digg is usually also on the front page of slashdot, and the comments on slashdot are consistently of a more interesting quality (as a caveat, I usually browse slashdot at a threshold of 4 or 5), not to mention quantity. The comments on digg, by contrast, are generally not worth reading, unless you just enjoy being annoyed. Slashdot comments are also threaded, meaning that you can follow the conversation tree down the many different discussion paths with some measure of ease; digg comments, aside from being generally trivial, are displayed in one simple list, which effectively will bar them from ever being as complex or as interesting as the comments on Slashdot.
It’s uncontestable that digg has been a success, but I, for one, am visiting less and less. I added it to my Firefox bookmarks toolbar, but I’m considering removing it, because it’s taking up valuable space (I like to have useful links in those spots).
Now, Slashdot has its faults; despite having been retooled to conform to xhtml and css standards, the site design looks a bit dated. Some (many?) of the comments are stupid, ridiculous, or more or less offensive. Some of the institutions which hover at the lower comment threshold are downright disturbing. (Note for the non-Slashdot readers: Slashdot comments are moderated, and are assigned an aggregate score (from 1- to +5) from the sum total of moderations done to them; this generally causes the more interesting comments to get a high score, and the most banal to receive a low score. You can choose to have only comments over a given score visible to you, the idea being that you are seeing the most insightful (or funniest) comments, and not the rest of the foofarah.)
Despite its faults, though, Slashdot will not be leaving my bookmarks toolbar; my digg bookmarklet is on the verge of being deleted.
Why? In slashdot terms, you could say that the entire digg.com website could be moderated -1; Redundant.
