Exploiting Community Knowledge in Digg (Update: Riff on BBC News too)
Ostensibly, this is a Digg Vs. Slashdot post… simply, Digg has poor comments, and Slashdot has interesting ones.
Digg is back under the radar following Kevin Rose’s OpenID announcement at FOWA. What struck me was that Kevin seemed like a genuinely community minded guy. He was very polite to everyone he came across; and seemed to genuinely love bringing people together.
In the new Web, community is business.
So what’s the problem? Digg has a generic audience. Slashdot is the hardcore geeks.
As Yahoo Answers has shown, there is both demand and value in people sharing knowledge in a useable way. On Slashdot, in times gone by, it was a great place to gain insights into trends and demands in the tech business world. You could quite literally define a business from what people openly contributed in the comments.
As Digg gained popularity, people have migrated from Slashdot… only their comments have not followed.
The solution? To visually recreate the sub-communities within Digg.
For any post, I envisage entrepreneurs wishing to discuss it, as well as developers, marketeers and many others (e.g. doctors).
Lets say I classify myself as ‘entrepreneur’… for any post, I will see other comments by fellow entrepreneurs with bigger text and a different colour. It means I can read a continuous ‘entrepreneur’ conversation; without losing the diversity of other comments.
With these more focused sub-communities, I feel a greater sense of belonging, and thus more inclined to to contribute. I also feel that my comments are likely to connect with like-minded people (and not just the ‘Digg idiots’). All in all, it is encouraging both more comments, and deeper comments.
The value? For Digg it means I am more likely to use it, and it can further solidify it’s “pro community” boast. For me, I can bounce ideas with like-minded people on current topics. And for the industry, it is fostering open collaboration, reducing network barriers, identifying new trends, and highlighting problems that need to be solved.
(As an aside, this is yet another good way to distill the news - by leveraging that implicit data: if you’ve called yourself an ‘entrepeneur’, then you can opt to see mostly posts that have a lot of comments by fellow ‘entrepreneurs’.)
Update 04/03/2008
This post now seems laughable, largely because Digg has become a teen hangout and as such, has suffered an exodus of everyone else (Reddit seems to have taken something of Digg’s former clientelle). It’s not black & white, but it’s clear community demographic has played a part in its downfall.
Update 06/03/2008
In writing this, it is perhaps wrong to focus on Digg. I see this being important for many commenting systems. It is a way of taming the overload. For instance, suppose BBC News were to allow people to comment on the day’s stories. It’s a compelling ability: people like to debate the news. The problem is that BBC New’s readership is so high that any comments would soon become a mob-like mass of screaming voices and ultimately, useless. However, if it could be split down into demographics - age, location, interests, then people could debate in a much smaller group that they are more comfortable participating in (with some random cross pollination of demographics for good measure, so the gene pool doesn’t become too similar).
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