Digg is a pretty cool website. Digg has lots of frequently updated news, lots of great links, and is pretty great overall. However, the community around digg is pretty… mindless.
For whatever reason, there seems to be some reoccurring topics that keep getting diggs. These are AJAX and Web 2.0. Now AJAX has been around for many years, but up until recently it didn't have a name. Some guy was nice enough to give it a name, a slightly cool name at that. Now it's THE thing to talk about. Anything that uses AJAX, no matter how useless, poorly designed, redundant, old, or crappy in general, is immediately dugg up to the front page. Searching for ‘AJAX”, there are 60 pages, 15 items per page. Most likely 60 pages is the maximum result count. That's an average of 2.0 diggs about AJAX per day. Insane. WHO CARES ABOUT AJAX YOU TOOLS!
Yet another reoccurring theme on digg is “Web 2.0”. Some have even mentioned “Web 3.0”. I have yet to see a single definition of either term. I think its safe to say that it involves AJAX, but it has to be more than just that. I can't think of anything though. I mean I can think of things that people may think is important, like the backend scripting language, data transfer protocols and formats, many things. But nothing that has been around for less than 5 years, which would most definitely have been part of “Web 1.0”. Anyone that uses a word or term without having a definition for it has no reason to use it. If I made up a term like “Internet 6.3b1” and defined it, it would be much more right in using it because it actually has meaning to at least one person. Joel Spolsky says: " The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness.” Correct!
The last thing about digg that bugs me a lot is the comments people leave. Here are some comments from some of the latest digg postings:
“YAY!”, “This isn't new.” (could have rated it old news), “Awsome!!”, “Awesome”, “Digg++”, “Cool !” (notice the space), “Fun stuff. +digg.”, “Great news.”, “nice..”, “i love wikipedia.” (don't we all), “i digg it yo !”, “Fantastic!”, “lol”, “cool”
Do any of these contribute anything to anything? No. Not only did you waste 5 of your seconds and 500 KB of your bandwidth (digg has really HUGE Javascripts if they aren't cached), you wasted 5 of my seconds and maybe 5 KB of my bandwidth. Multiply that by the number of users, and that's … (if you use 3 times the number of a front page digg, 3000 people, reading the comments) 5 hours of wasted time and 16 MB per worthless comment. Multiply that times 10 or so worthless comments per digg, that's 2 days of wasted time and 160 MB of wasted traffic. Thanks for making my day just that much better by making those amazingly awesome comments. Your life--.