Digg vs Slashdot, Give it a break.

OK, so I haven’t posted anything in a while, so I’m about to rant on something that’s been getting on my nerves. (Prompted by a Digg link today)

First off, for anybody who doesn’t know, Slashdot and Digg are both (supposably) technology news sites. Also, for the record, I currently read both at least daily. Where Slashdot is the old dog here (started in 1997), Digg is new kid on the block (November 2004).

The thing that’s been driving me nuts, is the apparent penis envy felt by the Digg community. It’s not enough for them to have a tech news site, it has to be better than Slashdot. They’re the guy who pulls up next to you at a red light and starts revving his engine and then takes off. Newsflash: there is no race, and you just made yourself look (more) like an idiot.

What these kids don’t understand is that the sites cater to different audiences, and have different purposes.

Slashdot is a news discussion site that caters to programmers, system administrators and the free software/open source community. The articles are hand-picked by a group of editors and are intended to provide the news while spawning some discussion. The discussion on Slashdot is good, so long as you filter out the trolls first (I read at +2 or +3 with the comments threaded and ordered highest scores first).

On the other hand, Digg is a link site. It’s catering to the new tech enthusiasts, web developers, bloggers, Apple fans, etc. The quantity of the links is much greater than that of Slashdot, but the quality is much less, there are often stories like “This site has a bunch of high-res wallpapers”, or “new episode of X is out”–I fail to see how that passes for news. And a large number of the submitters like to link to their own blog post about a news story instead of the actual story in a shameless attempt to get hits; to those people: “nobody cares what you think, just post the actual link” (as a sidenote, I already know that nobody cares what I think either, I write these posts for the sake of writing them). The comment system on Digg is also near useless–the majority of the comments say things like “awesome link. dugg”, adding no useful insight at all. When there are a few good comments, trying to find replies to them is a pain because the comments are totally flat (unlike Slashdot’s threaded system).

To clue this up, I still read both sites and will most likely continue to, they both have their uses. I go to Slashdot for the news and good discussion, and I go to Digg for links (the same way I go to del.icio.us).

One Response to “Digg vs Slashdot, Give it a break.”

1. ryan

   October 21, 2005 at 11:47 pm

   Have you seen diggvsdot.com, I imagine you’ll get a laugh from it….