If the future of social bookmarking and Internet news is indeed Digg, then there is something seriously wrong with the collective attention span of the public. I’ve spent probably an hour in total tweaking my Yahoo Pipes “Digg Stupidity Filter” RSS feed, which performs the following functions:
Removes idiotic stories from the general Digg feed: any meta-stories about Digg itself, pictures, Ron Paul, Huckabee, impeachment, or stories with two or more selected punctuation marks in the title. Removes any story without a lowercase letter. You’d be surprised how much more readable the site is. Takes some cues from the Digg Asinity Filter and removes some ridiculously biased “blogs”. Updated 2008-03-11 to remove Top X lists.
All in all, my biggest problem with Digg these days is the creatively-named lists of content. Because most people trying to make a quick buck off Google AdSense are lazy, and their readers suffer even more from the Deadly Sin of sloth, an article that’s guaranteed to attract views generally involves
- WordPress, Ubuntu, or Google
- A craftily-named topic guaranteed to draw these fanboys with a unique number
This is what reading Digg lists makes me feel like.
So an article liberally sprinked with ads, offering “17+ Ways Ubuntu Users can Improve Google PageRank with WordPress,” is the standard fare on Digg these days. The problem is that these lists only contain minor commentary and find creative ways of stretching the definition of their number.
Possibly the worst offender in this category is Mashable. It’s a social networking blog, and doesn’t necessarily appear on Digg on a regular basis. Yet still, Pete Cashmore’s authors can’t go two pages of content without posting “9 Great Games For The iPhone” or similar low-content lists.
Anyone who’s seen Idiocracy can tell what these lists essentially entail: dumbed down news for the proles.
To illustrate the scope of the problem from a technical perspective, here’s the main regular expressions that I use to filter some of these items. (Case insensitivity is not possible on Yahoo Pipes, or at least hasn’t functioned correctly when I’ve tried it.)
(The)?([0-9]*|One|T(wo|hree|en)|F(our|ive)|S(ix|even)|Eight|Nine)? \+?((b|B)iggest|(c|C)oolest|(m|M)ost|(p|P)eople|(g|G)(uy|reat(est)?)| (t|T)hings|(w|W)(ays|eird)|(r|R)ules|(k|K)iller|(e|E)ssential| (u|U)seful|(l|L)e(ast|gal)|(f|F)avo(u)?rite|(s|S)igns)
So, will people stop this nonsense? On my next post: The Top 4 (And More!) Reasons Why They Won’t. kthxbye.
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