undugg

Blog entry: WWdN: In Exile: what happened to digg?

I swear that Wil at wwdn:ix beat me to this topic only by a day or two. As I hit Ignore on yet another a-hole commenter over at digg.com, something inside me snapped. I realized how insane it was for me to spend time moderating a community that I don’t want to be a part of. The signal:noise ratio at digg is so low these days it’s not worth my time anymore.

I need a site out there that fulfills these requirements:

• News of all kind, but not stories that belong on fark
• Reputation. “Who’s saying this?” Basically, Slashdot’s karma system with some transparency. People who make insightful, on-topic comments receive reputation points from other people. Then I can surf comments where the commenter is above a certain reputation level.
• Trust. Similar to reputation. Larry and Randy may be new to the site, but I can set them to Trusted, and their comments and flagged articles will always appear regardless of reputation level. This might be similar to Slashdot’s friends/fans feature… I haven’t really gotten into it.
• Marking a link as Inaccurate or Spam actually does something. Reputation plays a part here. If the number of high-rep users marking something Inaccurate or Spam exceeds some threshold, the link is immediately pulled off the site for review. I’ve wasted a lot of time reading inaccurate articles or somebody’s blogspam-for-adsense garbage.
• Responsive UI. Points to digg.com for incorporating AJAX.

Those ideas aren’t fully refined, but that’s the gist of what I’m looking for in a site. Actually, Linkedin.com might be well-positioned to build a site like this. Their new Questions & Answers section has piqued my interest, primarily because I can see the occupation of who’s doing the asking and answering. If an IP Networking Engineer at Comcast answers my network routing question, there’s a decent chance that answer is correct… as opposed to, say, a graphic artist. But I digress (for now).

Anyway, Wil and his commenters cover this topic waaay better than I ever could, so go over there for awhile. I’ll be here.