Social News Sites Are Boring and Repetitive
February 20th 2007 10:57
Category: How it Goes
I don’t know if it’s just people who keep only voting up the same stories but Social News Sites such as Digg and Reddit are going around in circles with what they take to their respective front pages, and quite frankly they are getting boring at it.
When communities develop they change bit by bit, they eventually reach this level where they attract a certain kind of person and isolate others from it. This creates a massive community with a single ideological view on different matters with very minor differentiations from member to member.
Eventually as a direct result of this the stories that are consistently voted popular are monotonous and repetitive, boring and dull for those of us who want fresh content on a usual basis.
This isn’t the case all the time, there are variations in some popular stories but generally on Digg.com you will always find something related to either how great atheism is, how stupid and dumb some religions are, how Fox is a conservative news channel for the idiots of the world, something inane about Apple (such as Apple’s ‘20th birthday) or some more bad news for Sony.
On Reddit it seems more and more their own version of the front page is getting congested with comic strips about politics and to a lesser extent all of the above from Digg minus Apple stories and ‘bad news Sony’ stories. It is still a smaller community than Digg, it generates about half of Digg’s traffic. Reddit also suffers from a bit of Digg jealousy with quite a few stories reaching their front page detailing Digg’s impending doom.
Another thing that’s annoying me is that these websites (particularly Digg) are turning into self-whining groups with stories of how oppressed atheists are (it’s always atheists these days). Even Richard Dawkins is probably more than a little worried that he has been turned into the proverbial Jesus of Atheists, especially by Digg. In effect turning atheism into a religion like any other, what’s left is they form a religious institute, declare Dawkins their Jesus, son of Monkey’s and Saviour of the Atheists.
It’s something the few different people who browse such sites have to deal with, it is annoying and dull so now it isn’t just diving deep into the internet to find half-way decent stories, it’s diving down into these social news sites to find the half-way decent stories. At least they are easier to find than they were before, not to the degree the creators would have liked, but close enough.
When communities develop they change bit by bit, they eventually reach this level where they attract a certain kind of person and isolate others from it. This creates a massive community with a single ideological view on different matters with very minor differentiations from member to member.
Eventually as a direct result of this the stories that are consistently voted popular are monotonous and repetitive, boring and dull for those of us who want fresh content on a usual basis.
This isn’t the case all the time, there are variations in some popular stories but generally on Digg.com you will always find something related to either how great atheism is, how stupid and dumb some religions are, how Fox is a conservative news channel for the idiots of the world, something inane about Apple (such as Apple’s ‘20th birthday) or some more bad news for Sony.
On Reddit it seems more and more their own version of the front page is getting congested with comic strips about politics and to a lesser extent all of the above from Digg minus Apple stories and ‘bad news Sony’ stories. It is still a smaller community than Digg, it generates about half of Digg’s traffic. Reddit also suffers from a bit of Digg jealousy with quite a few stories reaching their front page detailing Digg’s impending doom.
Another thing that’s annoying me is that these websites (particularly Digg) are turning into self-whining groups with stories of how oppressed atheists are (it’s always atheists these days). Even Richard Dawkins is probably more than a little worried that he has been turned into the proverbial Jesus of Atheists, especially by Digg. In effect turning atheism into a religion like any other, what’s left is they form a religious institute, declare Dawkins their Jesus, son of Monkey’s and Saviour of the Atheists.
It’s something the few different people who browse such sites have to deal with, it is annoying and dull so now it isn’t just diving deep into the internet to find half-way decent stories, it’s diving down into these social news sites to find the half-way decent stories. At least they are easier to find than they were before, not to the degree the creators would have liked, but close enough.
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