Hopeless Geek

I used to love Digg. I really did. Every day, possibly several times a day, I’d hit the site and run down the front page opening all the interesting articles in new tabs and then the comments as well if it was something I wanted to know more about. It was quite nice for a few months.

Then they got money. Ever since that day, Digg has been going downhill quite fast. First came the popularity, and then the trolls that come with it, then the exodus of the good comment-writers because of the trolls. Later came the large upgrade the money paid for that alienated a large number of users and generally killed the features I used frequently.

And then came the second upgrade, the one that made me leave. After this upgrade, the comment system was simply unusable and full of buttons to load more comments when I figured that by clicking on “comments” I would get them. Along with that page was a tremendous nest of HTML and Javascript that took down Safari and Firefox both if I loaded more than one page at once, thus effectively killing my method of opening several pages together. When it got to the point that I was waiting two minutes to get all the links loaded, I realized it was getting fairly sad and moved to Reddit.

Reddit was lightweight and nifty. The commenters were well-informed and fun and made for good discussions. The links were more serious, but less insane. Overall, it was nice. This was a few months ago.

Today, Reddit is broken. The software update is but one break in a long series of them that is about to make me abandon it entirely, just like Digg. With the recent semi-failed update, Reddit brings “click to load more comments” into its vocabulary. That’s bad. It also brings the ability to turn off links from various “sub-Reddits” so I can ignore, say, politics (I’m already planning on voting for Ron Paul, I don’t need to see two articles a day about him). While good, the mere fact that they needed to go in that direction is a sign of the distress that Reddit was already in.

Reddit is succumbing to the trolls, just like Digg has, and Slashdot and Kuro5hin did so long ago. The links are primarily Chicken Little Politics, pictures, videos, and blogspam. The comments repeat the same things over and over again. Links repeat weekly. The effort involved in finding something useful has started to exceed the wait time of ten Digg pages in Safari.

That the Reddit staff can’t handle an upgrade is merely salt on the wound.

I’ve started my Total Fark membership up again and I’ll be over there. Drew won’t sell out (no one wants it), and it’s quite unlikely the site will be fundamentally broken in the near future. See you on the night crew threads.