Why did I stop using digg?

dude, that is awesome

"Looking back what made me float away from digg like Wilson was the poor comments, not the lack of good ones, but the overflow of bad ones."

That's exactly why I prefer Newsvine over Digg. I am a Digg user too, but now I hardly go there anymore. I just get Diggnation and the RSS feed for the front page stories. I really think Digg was a superb idea. What went wrong was the comments. One liners, short insults, raves, rants and SPAM.
It's good to see that there are more of us ex-Diggers moving onto Newsvine. I think this is the future. Quality news and stories integrated with blogging. A great concept!

I couldn't agree more with this post, it seems as though the few good coments in any article on digg are drowned out by the noise from people posting comments just to post them. Though I still read digg on a regular basis, I try to stay as far away as possible from the comments. Though, now that I've found newsvine I don't know if I'll have any need for digg anymore.

I think Digg got too big too fast.

Digg was a pleasure to visit a year ago, a new story would pop up every few hours, something with 8-10 diggs would be promoted the front page and the material was great.

I can no longer keep up with amount of senseless posts and posts of things that are years old.

I think Newsvine is everything Digg should have been but because Digg grew too fast they didn't have the time or talent to manage it all.

How soon till we see a Newsvine podcast?

Amen. When people at work would ask me why I didn't visit digg anymore, and I said it was mostly because of the comments, they'd say "well just don't read them!" - Well guess what, that's why I stopped reading slashdot too. The comments, and how people are reacting to the news, is what got me hooked on "social news" sites to begin with. When the people posting the comments aren't up to par, generally the submissions can be lacking as well.

I'd agree with MDWeezer

Count me in this group too. I find myself hardly going to Digg any more just for lack of time and interest. For that matter, my Slashdot reading has declined so much I'm thinking of decoupling my RSS feed for it. Frankly, I'm getting tired of seeing the same stories being covered by every single tech site.

With Newsvine I see the big tech stories, but I also see the other stories, the non-tech news. So far, as least, the commenting here has been superb.

I agree also that the quality of Digg has declined a bit lately. The first few months were filled with insightful comments and helpful additional links. The site quickly blew up and now is filled with more than its fair share of noise. It's unfortunate, but it's the price you can pay for having an appealing forum that is open to the public. There is a Boston Red Sox online fan community that has been able to maintain its very high standards for a number of years now by restricting membership and a boatload of self-policing. It will be interesting to see if the very young Newsvine will be able to maintain a high signal to noise ratio if and when it becomes a popular public destination.

I agree with the author. The quality of digg discussions is just plain bad. As of now, I'm just relying on my diggdot.us rss feed to get digg news, I'll pass on the digg community.

The quality of comments on Newsvine is higher than Digg, probably because Newsvine is still in private beta. How can Newsvine keep low-quality comments out?

I still use Digg a fair amount but I generally just skim over the front page. I read it all using Sage in Firefox and I have the RSS feed customized to the sections I want to go to. That is where I think the true power of Digg lies but I don't know how many people use it. For example I like looking over the latest submitted gaming stories. So I have an RSS feed to digg/gaming/digg which shows me the latest gaming stories submitted.

The thing that is so true is that form just being on Newsvie for a couple of days the community is over 100% more a factor than it is on Digg. And the fact that the community can offer something in depth like your news post is a breath of fresh air in the crowded internet.

Well, I'm still digging. I never cared very much about the comments. I use digg to find interesting links and cool things I haven't seen on the net before (geez, and I thought I had finished the web a few times over already). From the beginning (signed up in August) I never felt like going to digg for catching up with the latest tech-news. Maybe it is supposed to be a news site, but the users have voted against it. It has become a "cool links of the web" site. And as I read in a recent interview with Kevin Rose digg was meant to be a social experiment.

However I believe digg could be improved by abandoning the user ranking system and by drastically increasing the number of diggs to reach the frontpage. I personally found the new cloud-view page of all submitted digg stories to be the most useful part of digg.

"The quality of comments on Newsvine is higher than Digg, probably because Newsvine is still in private beta. How can Newsvine keep low-quality comments out?"

By keeping the topics of discussion intelligent and employing modding-systems like Slashdot which really work. As far as tech-news goes, Digg may be quick, but with Slashdot I can at least count on the intelligent contribution of the members as well as community-modding keeping the OT-comments off my browser.

I stopped going to Digg simply because the demographic seens to be about 14-17. Its frustrating to no end.

In defense of Leo Laporte, he's doing podcasting now. Has the great program TWIT (This Week In Tech.)

Kevin's on it a lot as well.

If you enjoyed the "Screensavers" on Tech TV, they are for the most part back together. They do a weekly Podcast (both audio and video). Check the link below and enjoy!

http://twit.tv/
TwiT

i never use digg. after i 1st saw it, i say "no way"
newsvine is a nice one

I think votes largely replace the "dude" comments.

I stopped going to digg.com for the same reasons. I'm tired of the poor spelling and grammar, lame stories, and the "dude, lol" comments. I stopped going to FARK.com too.

Newsvine.com is a breath of fresh air. Hopefully this place can attract and keep mature and talented readers and writers.

By keeping the topics of discussion intelligent and employing modding-systems like Slashdot which really work. As far as tech-news goes, Digg may be quick, but with Slashdot I can at least count on the intelligent contribution of the members as well as community-modding keeping the OT-comments off my browser.

I think that Slashdot is the wrong example, but some sort of moderation is going to be needed if Newsvine ever gets some real attention. It's important to note that Digg has had comment moderation for some time. Moreover, Newsvine, unless I've missed something, currently does not. Neither service has threaded commenting which shouldn't really be needed for news article replies but can keep overflows of comments more manageable to read.

I got away from Digg some time ago when the mases found it and started using it for blog traffic mongering purposes. Then the comments started flooding in and overall conversation went down to high school level. Newsvine has the look and feel of a more professional news service, with all of the social interaction expected from Digg. I think it has potential. In my opinion, it's more about the people using it, not the system itself.

DUPE! ;)

"The quality of comments on Newsvine is higher than Digg, probably because Newsvine is still in private beta. How can Newsvine keep low-quality comments out?"

By keeping the topics of discussion intelligent and employing modding-systems like Slashdot which really work. As far as tech-news goes, Digg may be quick, but with Slashdot I can at least count on the intelligent contribution of the members as well as community-modding keeping the OT-comments off my browser.

I agree that this will need to be implemented here to prevent the "digg-effect" (in the other, negative sense). When this site gets flooded once it's out of beta, I have no doubt that it will go the same route as Digg with the comments. In fact I think it would get even worse, since on Digg you can still mod comments down, which is not possible here.

I really hope a mod system will be implemented before Newsvine goes out of beta.

Newsvine is where digg was about 10 months ago, in the early-early adopter phase. That's why it's such a pleasant experience and has a great community. I can assure you over the next year, as it comes out of beta, the G4ers will eventually invade. I'm not bashing digg - I love digg, and visit several times a day - but out of every good comment, there are three lame ones, and there seems to be a high population of the "I'm too smart for this site but I come here anyway just to see what the wannabes are into today" kind of people.

I think the best move for Newsvine would be to stay invite-only for at least two or three more months, to get a good core community established, with the "culture" of the site already written on the walls. That would help stave off the type of user who is driving people away from digg.

but with Slashdot I can at least count on the intelligent...

Slashdot? Intelligent?

I've just started using Digg this year...it's funny because I decided to check it out because people were comparing it to Newsvine all the time. My usual sources for news/info/links are Google News, Boing Boing and Kottke. I like the first because it's broad, and the latter two because the links are high quality. Digg is somewhere in between...it's like a giant Value Village filled with all sorts of junk and some treasures.

I grown very fond of Digg! It's actually become one of my "check two or three times a day" bookmarked sites. But I almost never read the comments. I like the arcane links, design references and general cool stuff. The interface is pretty ugly (so is Google News), but it's pretty easy to scroll down and just skip over stuff.

One thing I've noticed about Digg (and Boing Boing) is that small sites that get recognized often aren't available due to bandwidth overload. Someone needs to figure out a solution...maybe an advertising-sponsored mirror site (with the owner's permission, of course). It's frustrating to click on a link and get an error message. With an increase of users, this could be an issue for Newsvine too.