Nov

27

More Diggs? Better Diggs? My own personal Digg?

November 27, 2007 |

I have been thinking about Dave Winer’s posts on how digg has started to suck and his idea of letting a thousand digg clones bloom instead.

Imagine Digg in the old days, when there were just 25 people using it. Maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe it didn’t really get interesting until there were 100 users or 250 or 1000. It was good, the articles were gems, things we weren’t finding on our own, there were huge numbers of them, but they were prioritized, and the community had a heart of gold, people were doing it for love. The maturity level was high.

I fully agree with his premise that digg has started to suck. Too much noise, not enough useful content. And then there are the commenters…

Thanks to projects like pligg, everybody can start a digg-like page today with about as much trouble as setting up a wordpress blog. And services like coRank can do all of the basic work for you (though maybe the Paris Hilton Live News site (”The largest repository about Paris Hilton news on the net”) isn’t the best way to showcase its abilities).

Problem is, a digg-like site doesn’t make sense until you reach a certain critical mass - let’s say about 100 active participants. Most people can’t seed a site like that, but Dave probably could. He has enough readers.

Most digg clones today, though, linger in complete anonymity because they were never seeded with enough users to begin with. Digg worked, because it had Kevin’s fans from TechTV heading over there.

So I am not seeing even a hundred thriving digg clones, but I can see Dave Winer getting one off the ground easily. I for one would sign up for a more mature digg in a second.


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