RIP Digg

I miss you already.

A lot of my friends are StumbleUpon addicts, but no sir, not me.

StumbleUpon, for those of you who have not been desperate for entertainment during an endless general education lecture, is essentially a toolbar in your browser that, when activated, will take you to a website that it has determined that you will find interesting based on preferences you set when you downloaded the service, and then drops you off there to explore, like a Mom leaving her kid at Discovery Zone.

Of course, it’s tempting for me to have the ability to turn the information superhighway into some sort of court jester, bringing me things it believes I will find entertaining, but I stay strong. For one thing, I get precious little accomplished as it is without a quick and easy way to distract myself, and also… Well, this next one probably requires a new paragraph.

And also, using the Internet is already probably one of the more passive activities out there, which is probably why I spend most of my life on the Internet. You just sit around thinking of stuff you want to know more about, and then typing that stuff into Google or Wikipedia, a process that in turn will lead to more stuff you find interesting. You’re just drifting along in a digital innertube down a peaceful river of information, catching the occasional glimpse of some pornography just below the surface – and yeah, if you want to cast your line out and try to catch some of it, that’s fine, so long as there’s nobody on the riverbank watching you.*

*Speaking of, have they got StumbleUpon for pornography yet? Because I feel like that would be the world’s greatest invention for perverts with ADHD. “I want lesbians! Click Now midgets! Click Now anime! Click Now for some horses!”

StumbleUpon, through, has accomplished the seemingly impossible task of making Internet use even more passive than ever before – it provides you with a button essentially labeled ‘USE INTERNET’, which you push, and then you are using the Internet. It’s like wanting to float around on your innertube but being too lazy to leave the house, so you hire someone to do it for you and provide you with pictures of the best parts and a cooler full of the fresh porn he caught along the way. I imagine StumbleUpon 2.0 will probably read the webpages out loud to you while you sleep, and maybe order you a pizza for when you wake up.

The thing is, I’m not without sin in this regard, because I have found a means to filter the vastness of the Internet down to a few relevant and interesting chunks, and that means is a website called Digg, where users submit webpages and vote on their relative goodness, and the ones with the most votes are presented to the visitor in one big, constantly scrolling sort of top ten list. Clicking a link listed on Digg is like reading a good review of a movie and going to see it, only the review only consists of ‘WE FIND THIS INTERESTING AND SO SHOULD YOU’, and if you don’t like it you aren’t out $15.

What I like about Digg is that since it isn’t tailored to my specific interests but is rather governed by the collective nerd groupthink of the Internet, I’m occasionally exposed to new, fascinating things I’ve never looked at before. Of course, the majority of Digg lines up perfectly with my interests anyway, seeing as the collective nerd groupthink of the Internet also loves science fiction, Cracked.com, and bacon.

The thing about Digg, though, is that there is a complicated hierarchy with regard to how sites are voted on, whose votes are more powerful, and how many votes it takes to get a site listed on Digg’s front page. For the most part, I’m oblivious to this – I don’t comment or vote on submitted sites and I only joined Digg so that I could submit Writers, in hopes that it would wind up on the front page and go viral (instead, Mike and I each gave it one Digg and then it died).

Recently, Digg has gone into an uproar for reasons I can’t fully understand – the development team released a new version which apparently kills small children and doesn’t like Firefly, to hear Digg’s enraged users tell it, and in protest the community which until now had trolled the Internet for new content to submit and vote on has now more or less gone on strike, opening the door to new users who have hijacked the site and started voting lame, low quality articles onto the front page. Don’t believe me?

This is currently the #3 highest voted item on Digg today.

While the Digg higher ups battle it out with the striking community, it’s lazy people like me who stand to suffer. After so many years of having my Internet prepackaged for me into easily digestible chunks, being left without Digg is like being thrown into the deep end of the pool. Now when I’m bored I can’t fall back on Digg to find interesting things – I either have to find them myself or stop using the Internet.

It’s times like these that StumbleUpon, run by algorithms with no need for an unpredictable human community, looks pretty damn attractive…

Truman Capps will never use Reddit, out of solidarity to Digg.