Ryan Morlok’s Blog

I remember a year or two ago when I discovered Digg when linked from a Slashdot article. At the time, I was bored with Slashdot because the churn wasn’t fast enough and I had some serious time to waste while I avoided school and working on my thesis. Digg seemed like a savior with its endless supply of interesting stories that had a bit more variety than Slashdot but also covered the great technical topics that I loved.

Fast forward to today, and I’m moving back to Slashdot as my primary news feed. Digg today is full of so much junk it’s not interesting to read anymore. There is a huge social and political bias, but worse than that 90% of what you find there is random pictures of stuff that’s only somewhat entertaining.

I think we’ve observed a unique point in history. For years and years, pictures and video was accumulating without an outlet to share it with more than a few close people. Then sites like Digg and YouTube burst on the scene and allowed all this funny and interesting content to be viewed by the masses. Problem is, we quickly got through all of that content, and there is no way for the world to produce that much on an ongoing basis, so everything got stale.

A similar thing has happened with Facebook. This one could be more related to the fact that as you leave school, these social networking sites become less interesting, but I think the problem is more related to the applications that were introduced to the platform less than a year ago. I can think of lots of great ways to use this API for things that are useful, but it turns out that’s not what the masses want. The masses are interested in turning people into zombies, taking movie quizzes, and giving each other virtual free drinks. Yep. That’s about it.

Turns out the problem with these social technologies is society, as a whole, is not that interesting. I’ll take then endless stream of stories about linux making inroads on the desktop over that any day.

Congrats, Shoe, I’ve just validated your opinions.