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275 Comments
- cdlavalle, on 10/12/2007, -20/+229Here's a theory....it also applies to why digg used to be much cooler and interesting and is now ebbing into crappitude. Slashdot caters, as digg used to , to technology enthusiasts, programmers and such. These tend to be better informed, more intelligent people than the average. Now digg is trying to cater to everyone which leads directly to a muddled mediocre mess with discussions falling to the lowest common denominator. The same happens on slashdot as well but the LCD is quite a bit more elevated than on digg. Thus, better discussions because we don't have to waste time arguing the obvious.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -13/+215I'd appreciate an actual thread system on digg.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -11/+130Digg has far too much trolling, not even the good kind like on slashdot. Too much flaming also, and the stupid digg down game...
digg needs more nestled comments, maybe go to 7-8 layers deep to allow for more in depth discussion. We also need some way of finding out who replied to our comment, so we can further discuss it, like an alert system or emails.
The requirement to be dugg down should be 5-7 diggs as you want only the truly off topic/useless comments buried, not unpopular ones.
I have noticed that the majority of digg comments are clever one-two liners, or the "canned quotes" (soviet russia, chuck norris, overlords, etc.) Slashdot has much more in depth discussions that are genuinely interesting and productive. Digg also has the problem of blogspam, where the blog crashes and the site it links to crashes, making duggmirror cache the stupid blog not the story.
Basically, what it comes down to is: digg has better stories, but slashdot has better comments.
/end rambles - whereisian, on 10/12/2007, -10/+92@cdlavalle
Agreed. Digg is becoming the mob.
I constantly hear 'if you don't like the story, then uncheck the topic in your settings'. But I'm interested in some of the stories.
The friends feature is interesting and am using it more to help find interesting comments. I'm trying to be careful to add 'friends' who have opposing views to mine also, as long as their comments are smart, reasoned and their diggs are interesting. It's been partially successful.
But I agree with the article - not enough levels of comments leads messy threads like this. And the digg up/digg down on comments has lead to some awful moderation. I've turned this feature off and just try to manually filter out the stupid comments. Email alerts would be nice. - ZippidyDoo, on 10/12/2007, -11/+82The problem is people replying to the first comment to get what they have to say closer to the top. Get in line people~
- atdigg, on 10/12/2007, -2/+721. It’s simple. Slashdot has multiple reply levels while Digg only has one reply level, so conversation is essentially limited to a statement and one reply
2. Digg also doesn’t e-mail users when someone replies to their comments, which would allow someone to post a comment and know when they got a reply.
Both are valid points, but the main problem is that you can ignore irrelevant comments, there's no karma system -- slashdot karma system even if not perfect works for me. Digg not having karma system encourages all kind of people to post crap because they are not really penalized, on slashdot they get automatically -1 so most of the people can ignore them -- trolls hate to be ignored. - Renshai, on 10/12/2007, -30/+94I'll give you a useless comment...
"If you're ever shipwrecked on a tropical island and you don't know how to speak the natives' language, just say 'Poppy-oomy.' I bet it means something." -- Jack Handey - Klisk, on 10/12/2007, -10/+70The only real problem with a "karma" system on digg is that, honestly, you get a bunch of jerks who don't even fully read your comment digging you down for no real reason. Then you reply to them, and they never come back to read your reply. Nevermind that you may write a long, intelligent post based on your personal opinion, and you get a bunch of kid's digging you down usually over some sort of nitpicky reason that makes no real sense. They just want to argue.
Digg is like the drive-by of social news.
I expect to get dugg down here too, yeah. - Llanowar, on 10/12/2007, -5/+57I do agree the commenting system is broken, but more because of each unoppular view getting dugg down than anything else.
And Zippidydoo is correct as well, most replies to the first post are pure commenting abuse.
That said, usually the first post doesn't even make any sense, but is just trying to be "funny" - Pile, on 10/12/2007, -8/+59This is obvious. Everybody's vote seems to count the same. The problem is everybody's intellect and maturity level is not.
- exsst, on 10/12/2007, -9/+48I vote for multiple threaded comments and a karma level!!
- konig12, on 10/12/2007, -3/+41Am I the only one who finds the comments to often be more interesting than the article itself? This is a perfect example. I dont think that the article's suggestions of emailing and multiple levels would really solve much. I think the comments on this page are for the most part more inciteful than the article. I think that the comments are a huge portion of Digg. Without the comments Digg is just an innovative way of organizing a newspaper.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+35I thought of a few more:
For one, we do not have a delete button. There should be the option to delete your comment within 3 minutes of posting, it would get rid of a lot of unnecessary "(digg me downs)".
Two, although not that bad of a problem a lot of the times people but their comments in one huge block of text, 30 lines long. It makes it hard to read as all the different ideas are mashed up into one, I just find it annoying.
I want to take what Pile said one step further:
There should be a weighted comment vote, where users with consistently dugg up comments and actively contribute should have their vote count as 3, average users count as 2, and the consistently buried/blocked users count as 1.
More time for comment editing would be nice also. - danielrh9, on 10/12/2007, -5/+32That article hardly touches on the real issues. The lack of a real thread structure is a big problem, but the digg up / digg down system on individual comments is also a problem for a number of reasons. Comments at the top are skewed to either having a ton of + diggs or - diggs simply because they are the most viewed. The idea of having comments individually dugg also brings about the ***** who are simply attempting to "burn" or "own" those who might simply be conversing just so they can get their coveted + diggs.
- Drewboy64, on 10/12/2007, -4/+29Better than You Tube's commenting system.
- alexhhhh, on 11/28/2008, -8/+33actually the biggest problem is that people use the digging down feature to get rid of comments that they disagree with, thus any possibility of actual level sided debate is nonexistent
- burtonbe, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23I think the bigger problem is that dugg down comments are collapsed, and thus effectively censored. Digg's moderation system makes no distinction between irrelevant/trollish comments and quality comments that happen to be unpopular. Both get censored. That's what's wrong.
- rationalist, on 10/12/2007, -3/+23The problem with your republic vs direct democracy proposal is that it doesn't scale. Automated systems that tap into the wisdom of the crowds and allow collective moderation do work - on slashdot, on dailykos, on other large-scale sites.
The problem here is not the moderation, per se, it is the lack of community. The lack of community feel, in turn, is a result of poor conversation architecture. Digg is simply not designed by people who understand community. They are wizzes at the rest of the site's functionality, but frankly suck at facilitating conversation, which, in turn, fosters community.
One example: The most lively threads are the ones that tend to interest the most people - but those are the ones it is most frustrating and difficult to participate in, because there is no threaded reply system.
If the Digg folks understood community-driven design, they would notice the awkward artifices we resort to to try and engage in conversation, such as the "@so-and-so:" followed by a pasted quote - which we have to remember to have copied before we reply, because hitting reply scrolls us down to the bottom of the page, and we then have to try to find the comment we are replying to, in order to A) know who to put after the "@", and B) copy the quote we forgot to cite in the first place. It is a pathetically frustrating UI, and so time-consuming that only people really passionate about something bother with it - which, in turn, encourages conversations to turn into flames and discourages the more thoughtful, moderate members of the community from participating.
Which, in turn, encourages using the digg-up/digg-down moderating system as a quick, cheap response system instead - which subverts the intent of moderation to rate tone not content.
The whole thing is classic design by engineers who know code real well but community-dynamics poorly. Dailykos went through the same thing in the first few years before they finally learned how to do it right. I hope Digg doesn't become a victim of its rapid for-profit success and not care about getting this part right.
If nothing else, Digg could be worth an order of magnitude more if they had a strong community to go along with the technology. - mastershake1, on 10/12/2007, -11/+30Since it's inception, Digg has punished people who provide valuable comments, while rewarding people who use stupid buzzwords. If you use the favored lame words of the day ("NO DIGG," "buried as inaccurate," "blogspam") you get Dugg up. Around here, people RARELY make posts to inform people, but instead to draw attention to themselves.
Go to Free Republic or Democratic Underground and you expect a bunch of angry partisan comments. You go to Fark and you expect angry, sardonic comments. You go to Slashdot and you expect Linux-happy tech talk. People learn the rules of the road for each site from other posters, and around Digg, the blatant attention whoring and seeming lack of desire to comment on the actual story does just go with the herd mentality. You go to Digg and you expect angry me-tooism. - jgc7, on 10/12/2007, -4/+23In Slashdot, I default to +4 or higher, and the comments are usually quite good. In Digg, I do the same thing, but 50% of the high rated comments are replies to flamebaiters or trolls. For some reason, trolls and flamebaiters are just modded down in slashdot, and the replies are never moderated up, but in Digg the folks that disprove the trolls get lots of positive moderation. Just an observation, but I think if the flamebait/troll comments completely disappeared (at say -4 diggs), there would be less incentive for the trolls and flamebaiters and there would be no reason for people to post rebuttals.
Kevin,
Please give me the option to make all comments and their replies at the -4 digg level, completely disappear from the comments.
thx,
john
There are a couple of other problems, such as everyone replying to the first post, so the comment stays on the top. Like this post. :P - robio376, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20I used to love digg, I still do in a way. But commenting on an article is pretty pointless. You try to make a good argument or a simple reply to someones response and basically you get mobbed. I like slashdot for the informing articles and the good comments. But I love digg for the broad range of articles, but hate it for commenting system. I try not to even comment unless I have a valid point. I know there are trolls and fanboys that just like to piss people off with their stupid comments. The sad thing is that people give them a thumbs up for comments like " I LIKE CHEESE!!!". There just needs to be a way to weed out the off-topic, stupid, comments so the real diggers can have a conversation. I know I will be dugg down for my comment, but thats what I have come to expect from digg.
- mastershake1, on 10/12/2007, -2/+19Yeah, right on. I take pride in being part of a community whose best observations are "that article sucked, NO DIGG" or "it's from a blog, and you all need to know that I hate blogs."
- OmegaNine, on 10/12/2007, -3/+19Holly ***** could you imagine if you got an E-mail every time someone replayed to your comment and you where the first commenter? All in a sudden you get 50 E-mails in a row that have nothing to do with your post.
- Gizza, on 10/12/2007, -3/+18That exactly right. Every comment ends up being the same thing and anything that strays from the common consensus gets buried.
- scallon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Very simple solution: Don't display the diggs a person has received until after the person has chosen whether to give them a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
Once a digg hits -3 or so, getting back into a positive score is nearly impossible. Why is that? Is it because every person on digg has the exact same opinion on everything? Right....
I have seen comments at +18 that get dugg down, and never receive another positive digg. Admit it, almost every person on Digg looks at the amount of diggs a comment has before reading it. Therefore almost every person on Digg is biased towards the commenter's opinion before he even reads it. These leads to a couple majors problems. Not the least of which is the fact that people who dont understand what a person has said will tend to just follow what everyone else has said. That is, if a comment is in the negative the person diggs it down, and if the comment has a positive number of diggs, the person just assumes he didnt get the comment, but since everyone else seems to agree, the person must be right.
This could be a small step towards improving some of the problems with Digg. - flag564, on 10/12/2007, -14/+26That feature has turned Digg into a sudo dictatorship.
Not pro Apple enough = Dugg down
Not liberal enough = Dugg down
A few users can make a debate into a one-sided echo chamber. Mod and "karma" points will just make it worse. - Pebcak, on 10/12/2007, -8/+20Not broken? What about the stories with comments with nothing but negative diggs? That makes it impossible to discuss the article, and is most definitely a flaw in the system.
- d00ley, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13@cdlavalle
Intelligent conversations would flow much better with a threading feature (reply to a reply). The @username ***** just doesn't work. Only a small percentage of people are going to scan back to find the user's one of many comments that the @username comment is in reply to. There's no way to deny this fact.
There could be a throttle for the depth of conversation if Digg really wants to keep it shallow. But, only allowing a "conversation" to go one thread deep is pretty frackin' ridiculous.
Anyway, @cdlavalle, I think your theory on the less intelligent masses devaluing the conversation is a bit snobbish (I really don't mean anything negative by that, just a useful term; def. "clannish: befitting or characteristic of those who incline to social exclusiveness and who rebuff the advances of people considered inferior"). Any tool that allows the less intelligent to engage the more intelligent in conversation is inherently a value to each participant and society as a whole. Simply put, Digg could be (and should be) a great tool for the democratization of intelligence. And, I don't think the more intelligent should shy away from this opportunity or dismiss it as without value. - ZaNkY, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Another factor is the commenter’s expected and projected maturity levels.
The way digg commenting is set up at the moment, it is meant for professionals to comment about an article. You can mod up the “professional” that makes the best point/critique and by the same token mod down those that make unrelated or otherwise “bad” comments.
Reality? Though the vast majority of Diggers still comment intelligently, a few immature diggers ruin the experience of others, and to make matters worse are given TOO much power. It takes only 4 immature users to decide to mod down every single comment for the hell of it. This renders ALL comments unreadable by default (you’d have to change your preferences or on the fly how to sort diggs). Those few immature users who comment nonsensical posts are usually taken care of by the community, and dugg all the way down the page.
Basically, the system is not perfect. It has strong points, but plenty of places to improve. - jessecurry, on 10/12/2007, -7/+17I actually did mention that near the end of the article with the statement:
"Maybe along with multiple levels of reply Digg could add a reputation system that would either boost or handicap posters based on the percentage of comments that they’ve had Dugg down, but I think I’m getting a little ahead of myself."
I think that there are a lot of changes that could go into effect to make Digg a great place, but I wanted to start with the two that I thought would lead to the most sweeping change. I think that a karma or reputation system would almost be a necessary consequence of multiple reply levels. - spect3r, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Here is a suggestion....
Have comment flags, like slashdot.
Instead of Thumbs up or Thumbs down - you can choose whether the comment is "informative" "funny" "spam" "flame" etc.
Then, users who really care to read "funny" comments, can just filter as such as their default.
Could work?
I originally was suggesting have all comments with 5+ thumbs up float higher to the top - much like digg stories reaching the front page, but then I thought - so many comments with 100+ thumbs up are the ones that are "funny" - not informative.
So this is why Digg is a social site. Comedy seems to gain more recognition than thought. Which is why I'll bet no one reads this comment! - b7illsmith, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12Yeah. Digg my comment down all you like. IT STILL DOESN'T MATTER! Digg.com doesn't care about the comment sections. By design, Digg is primarily focused on getting you to submit and vote up stories for the front page.
When you look through this site, how sophisticated is the comment section vs. the rest of the site? Seems like an afterthought, right? Because it is.
Have you ever noticed that your ranking is NOT affected by the moderation on your comments?
Have you noticed that your ranking is NOT affected by the amount of moderating you do on other people's comments?
Have you noticed that there is no Top Commenter Ranking?
Digg.com doesn't care about comments BY DESIGN.
The comment section is just a "nut house" on the outskirts of town, placed here for you amusement. - Lumiras, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12I do think that the comment system needs to be revamped. A multi-tiered system would probably be a good start, but there also needs to be some better organization. Once a post gets past the 50 comment mark, it's a total chore to attempt to glean any useful information out of the comments. I'm not so keen on the e-mail thing, because comments on the stories are really fast paced, so you would probably get 10 e-mails a minute sometimes
Also, as Digg's userbase expands way past the tech world, you're going to get your share of bad apples from the other realms of news. This is Digg's own self-made poison when they opened the subject matter to encompass more than geek culture and technology. You get cross-polination of commenters on topics and it's a bad thing, really. Now, people who might be very informed tech geeks are also stirring up comment wars in the political section. The same thing happens as hard-core gamers trash anything Linux related as boring.
Users should also be given the right to comment. They need to be around the site for a while, digg some stuff and just generally be part of the community. This would weed out a lot of the immaturity because most 14 year old jerkoffs are not going to be so dedicated to the site just so they can write "LINUX SUX!!!!!!" in a comment thread. The right to comment should be earned, I think
Another thing that might bring some more order to the comments on Digg would be the implementation of moderators. People who have been around the site long enough to know what's really going on and would be able to shut down flame wars before they got out of hand. I'm not talking about iron-fisted mods here, I'm just saying that I believe some people should have more power over comments than others, because the simple "thumbs up/ thumbs down" system is becoming more broken by the day.
Oh well, just my opinions though - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+14>>Agreed. Digg is becoming the mob.
Once slashdot was cool because it had tekkies. Then the posers, the wanna-bes and smart-ass kids moved in.
Same thing has happened here. Digg has become the mob. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10The problem with Digg is there are too many idiotic kids on it.
- griz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Here is my proposal.
I want to see my own comments appear with a red heading.
I then want to see all the other comments color coded according to how new they are.
That way I don't need to scroll up and down on the list searching for new comments hidden in the mess of other comments. If I see a Blue comment, I know it was posted within the last minute. Green comment, within the last 5 minutes, Yellow comment, in the last 15 minutes and grey comment, in the last 30 minutes and white, greater than 30 minutes ago.
It will also be an immediate visual indicator of the level of activity in the particular comment section.
Lastly, I want the ability to sort threads by "My comments". Then I can watch only the threads that I am participating in without scanning around for my own comments. - charlescheese, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I think the moderation up and down of comments has killed the site. I find this site much less satisfying since then. It's become a popularity contest, and mob mentality is what always wins. The dissenting voice has no voice on Digg.
- shit, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8>> "Timmy!"
And a feature that automatically deletes catch-phrases, quotes and memes.
I for one welcome our new South Park Futurama bury this will it blend overlords, you insensitive clod. - fxmcleod, on 10/12/2007, -17/+24^ sooo true, the karma system is the real solution here.
The explanation the blog gives is crap. e-mails would slow use, no one really wants that, and multiple levels just leads to meandering posts.
Also, the way to rely to a subpost, is just using @person's name. It seems to work fine. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Just the fact that this opinion/theory is being marked innaccurate proves that the commenting system is broken
- superal1394, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9I think the ability to completely delete a comment is needed too. I see alot of "Edit: Bury this comment" throughout Digg, not to mention some more complex threading would be nice.
- DisposableRob, on 10/12/2007, -6/+12"Some people get way too caught up trying to get +100 hits with a stupid joke."
On the other end of the spectrum, non-trollish comments that may be intelligently thought out yet contrary to the popular opinion will sometimes get dugg into oblivion. That makes it harder to weed out the trolls from comments that are merely "the other side of the story".
I think Digg needs to revamp its comment voting more than anything else. Really only trolls, spam and pointless comments should be getting dugg down.
At this point Fark has more in-depth conversations and they don't have nested commenting at all. - rationalist, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7"actually the biggest problem is that people use the digging down feature to get rid of comments that they disagree with, thus any possibility of actual level sided debate is nonexistent"
Any critique of online community that starts, "the biggest problem is that people" misses the point. What you are pointing out is a flaw in the design, specifically the community architecture of the site. People will do what the design enables them to do.
Designs that depend on people behaving "well" do not scale and are unsustainable.
Designs that reward desirable behavior and make undesirable behavior more difficult succeed. It is as simple as that.
The "@" convention is a good example. People doing that should be a message to Digg that we want to do something that the software is making difficult, so we have to devise our own kludge.
In fact, every effort to engage in constructive, ongoing discussion on Digg is the process of dedicated community members engaging in frustrating kludges to work around, not with, the system so that we can talk about the articles. That is not healthy community design.
There are simple, proven solutions to this kind of problem, requiring an understanding of online community dynamics. - TekeeTakShak, on 10/12/2007, -10/+16If Digg really wanted to ensure a better commenting circle, it would have to remove the "plus/minus" aspect. Some people get way too caught up trying to get +100 hits with a stupid joke.
A great example is what najdorf posted above. I quote, "Timmy!" And that was his comment. - mastershake1, on 10/12/2007, -6/+12Slashdot's metamoderation at least prevents the blatant herd mentality comment burying that goes on at Digg. Because people don't get to choose what they moderate, the moderated comments are stripped of identifying marks, and the moderation is reviewed, the most informative comments tend to get modded up while the less informative comments stay at a lower point value. People who routinely make informed comments are rewarded with karma modification, but that modification can be nullified. And while people could "cheat" the system, few people have the time or desire to do that.
The main downside to that system is that it is more centrally managed and so some comments fall through the cracks. But I'd prefer that type of system over the ridiculous free for all that goes on here. Look no further than the Christmas light thread and you can see how out of control retarded things can get. - joe90210, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9digg sucks because it's completely run by fanboy mobs, you can make the best argument ever but if it's against the mob opinion, it gets dugg down
- beni, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Slashdot has an advantage in that mods have a limited number of points they can spend. So instead of giving negative moderation to comments they may not agree with, they use their points constructively to promote comments that add value to the discussion, because unmodded comments are buried by default for most people.
In addition, meta-moderation on Slashdot helps weed out those who misuse their mod points by allowing anyone logged in to evaluate the moderations made by other users.
In short, Slashdot has checks and balances on its users, Digg does not. - deathsquadx, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Another thing is people who say the exact same thing as someone else, but they just use different wording. Read the comments, if someone already said it, don't make the same comment.
- jessecurry, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I wrote the article because it was something that was on my mind. The ads are there because there was space for them and I suppose that having some payback for hosting the site would be nice, but all of the ads are pay-per-click so after the huge amount of bandwidth that I used I only made $0.60.
What I was hoping to get from writing the article is some discussion, either for or against my ideas. Which I did. I also hoped to make Digg a better place because it is a site that I enjoy using immensely. We'll have to wait and see if that happened.
Before making a negative comment about me perhaps you should take a look at the other stories that I wrote on my blog, most are just observations about current events or things that interest me in life. If I wanted to make money from the internet I would spend more time scattering naked girls over my site, work on SEO, and add lots of CPM ads. - Phegan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I love how anything Pro-Digg gets prased.
Everything Anti-Digg gets bashed.
Bottom line 70% of you are mindless drones to dig. 20% of you are bloggers/marketers trying to advertise yourself by flooding digg with your *****, and the final 10% are average everyday people who like to actually read interesting news and converse about it. -
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