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.
Here, here. I never left slashdot, but I all but abandoned facebook about a year ago. Once they threw open the doors, the amount of crap coming through there exploded. I don’t want to be a pirate or a ninja. I don’t need a bible verse per day. I think Texas Hold’em poker is best played in person, not via a social networking site. Finally, I value my right to control who knows what about my life, and having it, pics included, displayed to the world seems a bit…odd. (Not to mention the recent Beacon fiasco). At this point, it’s only a “I wonder if X is still alive” or “what was that email address” (though as a professor, it was a nice tool to see if people were lying about what’d they done that last weekend).
Anyway, back to waiting for a site that fulfills my social networking needs, but doesn’t require me to disable my brain to use.
I never needed validation. I’ve always said it sucked. You’re just now realizing why. You used to argue on its behalf because of what it COULD support – but what you’ve talked about in this post is exactly why it DOES suck – and anything like it always will. You can attempt to replace real people with cool technology but it will still be the same lame variation on crap to people like me. As for news sites, etc – that maybe is just a personal complete lack of interest. I have no desire to open my browser or RSS reader and read through articles all day long. If there is more attention needed than like once or twice a week – I’m really not interested. And even then, Shanley’s hockey and quotes posts and your posts will always grab my interest more than 10 million slashdot articles – because I have a personal connection to them I suppose.