Things I hate about social bookmarking / news aggregation / whatever

Social bookmarking is a fancy new word to describe “a forum”.  People post and discuss stuff.  Screw Web 2.0, that’s Web 30.718 at least.

There are several leading social bookmarking sites and they all suffer from a range of crippling inabilities.

Everyone’s an Editor, Nobody’s an Editor, Some Chumps are Editors

Editorial processes just don’t work. Whether it’s a hand-picked group of editors (slashdot) or everyone (digg & reddit) or nobody (stumbleupon & delicious).

Each of those methods have their flaws but essentially it comes down to bias. One editor with a bias is every bit as limiting as a group of users with a bias and the power to remove stories from a site.

Green eggs and spam

Spam is annoying. The most common spam is easy to deal with – it’s just a list of keywords that need to be maintained that block automated crap.

There is a more annoying kind of spam though and that’s bloggers who find a great story, write a sentence or two about it on their blog with a link and then submit their stupid post instead of the great story.

Digg and reddit suffer from that greatly, but due to curious favoritism it’s overlooked on some sites while frowned upon with the majority. I’m looking at you engadget – I love you guys btw .

I’m not sure what the solution is here but I like to think it’ll involve sharks with frickin’ laser beams.

Crowd control

This one obviously only applies to digg’s users, who have a long and rich history of looking like retards whenever they get their panties in a bunch about some perceived affront.

When you put 20,000 kids on a website there’s obviously a need for crowd control, so bust out your batons and start beating their thick skulls into the “Account disabled for being a retard” zone when they run amuck.  The adults who use your site won’t miss them and probably won’t leave, but if they do they’re replacable anyway.

Examples of their tomfuckery include defacing the netscape site, spamming the netscape site, spamming the yahoo site, spamming a Malaysian clone of digg, dos’ing the godhatesfags site, harassing the guy who posted the most hated comment ever, and of course their most recent effort, attacking digg itself.

Real comment threading

Slashdot almost got it right, digg appears to have missed the core concept of “threading” and failed miserably. Reddit did it great. Comments need to be really threaded and you shouldn’t have to click 300 times to read a conversation. Where do I rack up 300 page views to read a conversation, slashdot?

Making popularity matter

Digg and reddit really went all out on this. It’s like highschool all over again. Either you’re cool or you’re not cool. You’re in the cool group, or you’re not.

Making my vote worth something different from your vote, and her vote some other value is just plain confusing without some transparancy. Why not give me “karma” that publicly says “Hey, you’re a dick and your votes are worth only marginally more than a crack whore’s.”.  Or even just call me a crack whore.  I’m cool with that.

Involving the users … when is enough enough?

Stumbleupon and delicious are guilty of not really doing this. You can share links and post comments but that is a completely secondary feature of the site. Each user is essentially alone on those sites. Alone like an island, but a crap one like the one Tom Hanks got stuck on, not like Ibiza.

Slashdot doesn’t do it enough either – the only real involvement by users is commenting and rating comments if you have mod points. All submissions are filtered by editors. Even with their firehose crap you still have no hand in what’s being displayed.

Digg is guilty of doing it too much to the point where users form unofficial groups who then target and bury submissions and comments on topics they don’t like.

“They’re doing this with every LGF post that shows up at Digg now, and the swarm is almost instantaneous. If one of our posts gets to the front page, it’s buried within minutes.” ~ littlegreenfootballs.com

Note: I’m not expressing any opinion either way about that site’s political views, they’re just an example of giving users too much control over each other’s experience on the site.

Being able to gang up and remove stories because you disagree with their political view or arguments is detrimental to everyone else’s experience and demoralizing to anyone who shares an interest, or the views or opinions, of the removed stories *cough* digg *cough*.

Respecting the sites you rape

Digg and slashdot users will understand the immediate need for this – countless sites cannot handle the volume of traffic thrown at them by being featured on those sites.

There is an obligation to both the users and the website owner to cache a copy of the page if it’s featured and help share the load in a way that doesn’t screw website owners over. Why am I thinking of you duggmirror? Could it be the 15,000 pages of STOLEN content you’ve scraped that’s sitting in Google taking traffic from the rightful owners? Jerks.

It’s not impossible for digg, slashdot and the others to automate a process where the IP is checked, and simple maths can tell you if it’s shared hosting.  Like if there’s more than a handful of sites on that IP address.

Page sizes

This one’s for you digg and slashdot! Why do I need to download 350kb to view a page on digg or 200kb to view a page on slashdot?

The answer is the sites are poorly written. Slashdot has an excuse at least – their site is a big old mess that’d be a pain to restructure without rewriting the entire site.

Digg has no such excuse, it’s relatively new and has undergone 3 redesigns and regularly gets new bits of candy stuck on the ass of it for our enjoyment. Somehow making the site efficient keeps being overlooked though.

To some extent delicious suffers this, but only on the homepage. 100kb of JavaScript is necessary to view the homepage. They use the smartest approach though – the files you need to view page1 might not be the ones you need to view page2, so each page only includes what they actually need.

Old news

It doesn’t take long for a story to become yesterday’s news on digg, slashdot and reddit . Anything you have to say about a story needs to be said in the first hour because after that it’s dead.  There has to be a way to encourage conversation for more than an hour, you guys just aren’t looking hard enough.