I can understand Digg being infested with posts that are nothing but pictures — it’s a younger, less sophisticated crowd. But Reddit? Come on, guys; look at the current top 6 posts:

Options:

1. Create an images subredit.
2. Allow us to filter picture-only posts.
3. ?

Look, I prefer Reddit to Digg as well, but I don’t like being misled. As we all know, Wired has been bashing Digg lately. No biggie; many of the complaints seems somewhat legitimate.

 But it seems a little strange given the fact that Wired is owned by the same company that just bought Reddit.

This could just be a coincidence, but I doubt it.

 

I’ve just completed a “Reddit this” FeedFlare module for Feedburner users. This will add the option for your RSS users to submit your posts to reddit.com right from their RSS feed application. After it’s installed, it’ll look like this:

And here’s the FeedFlare link so you can use it in your own feed. I’ll be adding it to the official repository soon so people won’t have to do a custom addition: http://dmiessler.com/feedflare/redditthis.xml

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments.:

If you’ve been a Digg user for a while you may have noticed that it’s rather annoying when links open in a separate tab or window instead of the page you’re already on. Turns out there’s a fix:

1. Sign into Digg.
2. Go to your profile.
3. Click on the profile tab within your profile.
4. At the very bottom, pull down the “Never Open In A New Window” option.

That’s it. Life on Digg is subsequently improved by 347%. Enjoy.:

…I’m thinking a full-force email storm — like something they’ve never seen before. All of us — both Digg and Reddit users.

Maybe…just maybe…this combined with the media outcry will inspire the democrats to grow a spine and take action.

Here are your representatives: http://www.house.gov/writerep/

Everyone’s seen the cool little icons/buttons for Digg, Reddit, and Del.icio.us shown under various articles online. They make it easy for users to submit to their favorite social site by automatically filling in the title of your page. I also think they subconsciously add legitimacy to a web presence. In short, they’re just great to have.

A number of plugins can be installed in your blogging software to enable this functionality, but what happens if you want to use these little jems on your own static content? I wondered the same thing and made my own.

Here’s the code (click the image):

Just edit the code to point to your own copies of the images and you’re good to go. Now you can have them on whatever content you create — even if it’s not part of your blog software.:

Nothing is worse for systems like Digg and Reddit than repetitive, mediocre content. These networks are designed to magnify the efficiency of the Internet by taking excellent content — regardless of source — and promoting it through impartial democracy.

Ultimately, the goal is to minimize the time it takes someone to get up to speed on the most original/interesting content within a given area of focus, be it technology, politics, or whatever. When done correctly, the concept is quite beautiful.

Spamming vs. Contributing

The system breaks down horribly, however, when these communities fail to understand the difference between submitting original content and blogspamming. Many are confused about what blogspamming actually is: it’s not posting a link to something on your own blog or website (if it’s decent and original, that’s called “contributing”). Blogspamming is actually very specific (I had the Digg staff spell it out for me) — here are the requirements:

1. Find interesting content somewhere on the Internet
2. Post that content on your own website
3. Post the link to your website rather than the original source

This is blogspamming, and it’s every bit as evil as people make it out to be. But it should not be confused with people posting their own original content. That practice, i.e. sharing ideas, is what makes the Internet so wonderful.

The Idea Bazaar

When it comes to sharing ideas, the Internet should be viewed much like a traditional, open marketplace — where people bring the artwork, pottery, clothing, woodwork, etc. for public review. It’s like open-mic night in front of billions of people.

Hello, everyone. Here’s a short story I just finished. I hope you like it…

This is what the Internet is about, and I think Digg, Reddit, and their successors should be more open to this philosophy. We shouldn’t penalize people for offering their own original content to the world just because they submitted it themselves. It’s far more genuine to do that, after all, than to artificially manufacture a third-party submission (which so many people do).

Remember that writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people. Academics submit to their respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review is an absolute must in any system that values intellectual progress.

Communities that rely on a constant flow of quality content need to adopt a mantra of judging offerings based on only two things: originality and merit. Any would-be resource that fails to grasp this concept (or later forgets it) is doing its users a disservice by discouraging would-be contributors from participating.:

I just got pwned by the Digg effect — for like 15 hours — and I’m still unsure of where the bottleneck was.

Was it MYSQL? Was it Apache? I need to do some research. If it’s my host I’m going to pummel them, and if it’s inefficient code on my server, then I’m going to rectify that. I do know that I could still ping my site while the website was down. I could still SSH to it as well, and get mail.

I’m thinking it has to be AMP based. So embarrassing…I pay good money for a dedicated server, and I should to be able to withstand a Digg effect better than this. This can’t happen again.

If anyone’s a guru on optimizing servers to withstand traffic onslaughts, let me know.

There’s a problem with Reddit and Digg, but it’s not what you’ve been hearing. It’s not the spammers, and it’s not the voting systems. The real issue is that people don’t know the difference between legitimate promoting of one’s own original content and blogwhoring or blogspamming.

Most think blogspamming is when you repeatedly post links to your own original content, hosted on your own website. But that’s not it; blogspamming is when you take someone else’s content, put it on your site, and then post the link to YOUR page instead of the original source. It’s truly disgusting behavior.

The difference is massive, and the survival of sites like Reddit depends directly on people understanding this.

The Idea Bazaar

The Internet’s most beautiful trait is its ability to rapidly propagate good ideas, regardless of source. It’s much like a traditional, open marketplace where people bring the pottery, clothing, woodwork, etc. and ask their peers to look at it. Or, even better, it’s like open-mic night in front of billions of people.

Hello, everyone. This is a poem I’ve written. Or here’s a short story I just finished. I hope you like it…

This is what the Internet’s about, and I think Digg and Reddit should be more open to this philosophy. We shouldn’t penalize people for offering their own original content to the world.

Writers submit their work to publishers; they don’t wait for it to be found. Artisans have shows and invite lots of people. Academics submit to their respective journals. Submitting original content for peer review is an absolute must in a society that values progress.

Sites that are based on a constant influx of quality content need to adopt a mantra of judging offerings based on only two things: originality and merit. Any would-be resource that fails to grasp this (or later forgets it) is doomed to fail.

– [And yes, it's pretty obvious from the post that this has happened to me before, but this isn't a bitterness issue. I speak partly because I'm guilty of it too -- being quick to judge based on things other than content.]

I made it to the front page of Digg yesterday for the first time — very exciting stuff. What’s not so exciting is that my web server was not available for the few hours that it was being obliterated by Digg users. I can’t imagine how many tried to see the article but weren’t able to while my server was reduced to a foul-smelling liquid.

Anyway, I’ll be taking a look at the logs to see what the bottleneck was: apache, the database, bandwidth, or some combination of the three. Looks like I may be in for an upgrade to the server, assuming it’s not cost prohibitive. But first I have to find out which piece took the beating…