Digg.com Resumee

I’ve been subscribed to the social network Digg.com which is primarily used to add interesting links to blogs, news and just plain websites to an index. But the idea of using the service is ridiculous. Digg is down almost everytime I’m checking it out. Timeouts, errors and overall connection problems become an annoyance. The following message could be displayed at least each hour twice to compete with the digging users:

Digg is adding servers to keep up with demand – digg back in 30 mins. (9:45AM PDT)

At least the owners and programmers behind Digg learned to inform the users instead of giving them a hangtime lag. Nice to know, but the service is far from being usable. The idea is undoubtely beautiful to create a social network, but with people come problems. The users are behaving like net-extremists.

At first, nearly every one who feels uber-cool and geekish is trying to pull the virtual trigger at you – if you dare to make a mistake, especially if you’re new to the service, but not new to social networking. Insults, flaming and pure hatred are coming your way. Anybody can register and simply start to insult another user because they feel like it. A moderation like on many webforums or in blogs of comments does not happen, you can only rate the comments for future reading or ignorance of the flame-users.

At second, the system has a major flaw. Once you publish a supposedly new link, the chance is quite high that the server does not return correct search results to prevent duplicate posts about the same topic. Even if you have used the internal search engine to look for the URL and the title or specific keywords, the result is empty. I found myself adding a link which already existed on the server, yet no search revealed it to me. Being called „noob“ by the self-proclaimed digg.com-elite just made me laugh. Is it my fault that the software is not fully developped yet? Clearly not.

At third, the topics offered are usually not much more than „click me“ posts. If one expects the social networking extension to content-linking, disappointment may be the most simple result. The topics are less special than it looks like. Most of the links are leading to techie-content, but this content lacks of originality.

By now about 20 minutes later, the update message has changed to the worse:

Digg is adding servers to keep up with demand – digg back in 30 mins. (3 PM PDT)

In the end, Digg appears to be one of the most capable social networking systems, yet suffers from its under-developped community. If you’re not with them, if you’re not their mainstream, you’re clearly going to get the red card and a „It’s lame content“ reply. Let’s wait for next week to see if I’m still digging in and out ;)