Stop Complaining About Poor Content and Submit Your Own
By Daniel Miessler on October 7th, 2007: Tagged as Blogging | Social | Writing
You can barely go a day on Digg or Reddit without hearing the cry of poor and declining content quality. It usually comes in the form of, “This place used to not suck so much” or, “Is it just me or is the content here getting worse and worse every day?”. Perhaps it is, but I have a crazy idea:
Stop complaining and submit your own content. Write something. Create something. Comment on something. Tell us what you think. Contribute.
And don’t worry about the stigma of submitting your own content; the whole concept is crap. Nothing limits the quality of what we read more than the idea that it’s socially unacceptable to self-submit. It limits what we see to two groups:
- Money-seeking spam leeches
- An extremely small minority who can see through the stupidity of the self-submission stigma.
The first group isn’t going anywhere, so the only long-term solution is to increase the ranks of the second one.
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, and academics submit to their respective journals. In short, submitting original content for peer review is crucial in any community that values intellectual progress. And it’s the only way to keep the quality of a site at a consistently high level.
If we as readers want superior content then we need become part of the solution. That means two things:
- Appreciating quality writing even when it’s submitted by the author
- Creating and submitting our own material without fear
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The good content is on there, it is just that the masses digg the poor content and the proper stuff never has a chance to get to the front page. When websites like digg start up they are dominated by geeks, and the content reflects that but once it grows in popularity you end up with pictures that are circling online for 5+ years, someones blog bashing someone with a quote taken out of context, and all kinds of pissing contest type of stories.
Comment by Vitaliy — 10/8/2007 @ 10:24 am
I agree wholeheartedly with what you say about self submission, but I don’t think that’s the solution. The reason the content is going down hill is because the audience is changing. Digg and Reddit used to be much more niche oriented. A smaller group of discerning users submitted and promoted content that appealed to them. Now that social media is going mainstream, you see the horrific mainstream taste coming through. Not a bad thing, just a fact of life. The purists will have to build a new site.
Comment by John Wesely — 10/9/2007 @ 1:40 pm
I’ve slown down on coming to digg. 3 out of 10 posts are the same old ‘how much we hate Bush’ or generic liberal whining. It get’s old and I now submit less to digg than I used to, mainly because of learning that digg’s direction is now more political. Oh well, no one to blame but us I guess ;=)
Comment by Buddy Priefert — 10/9/2007 @ 5:22 pm
Nice post. I for one, have never found digg to be that valuable to me. It always seems as though the popular content is of little to no consequence to me. It also seems like if I do find good content, it’s not very popular. I think the demographic of users has changed, and John Wesley is right when he says that maybe the “purists” need a new site of their own! I also agree with you that self-submission should be encouraged and accepted. In any other type of writing profession, that’s what you have to do to pave the way for your work.
Comment by bluskygirl — 10/9/2007 @ 5:26 pm
What I don’t understand is why half of the Digg posts are from just a handful of web sites. It makes me not want to visit Digg more often than every few days. I don’t think there’s a problem with the content submissions. I think that some users just need to back off from excessively promoting the same web sites over and over, and stop turning to other people doing the exact same thing and say they are regurgitating content that’s already been posted, or posting something lame. Just be unique. Don’t worry about anyone else’s submissions. Like my mother irritatingly told me many times, “Go fry your own eggs.”
Comment by Frederick Szczepanski — 10/9/2007 @ 5:39 pm
Fuck You.
Comment by Jimbo — 10/9/2007 @ 5:47 pm
[...] content here getting worse and worse every day?”. Perhaps it is, but I have a crazy idea….read more | digg [...]
Pingback by Jonathon Zone » Blog Archive » Watch Video Bra Sensuous Stop Complaining About Poor Content And Submit Your Own — 10/9/2007 @ 5:47 pm
The good content does get submitted, it doesn’t get dugg enough. People like pictures of kitty cats, female sports stars in the buff and a shitload of pointless top 10 lists. The system works, the issue is as always with the biological interfaces.
Comment by DAVE ID — 10/9/2007 @ 5:49 pm
Some of us are not narcissistic enough to submit our own blatherings. There’s something perverted about it, a bit like auto-fellatio. Then again, some people pay big money to see others auto-fellate.
Comment by renumeratedfrog — 10/9/2007 @ 6:41 pm
@renumeratedfrog
Congratulations, you are part of the problem. Imagine a world where no one every sumitted their own work. Artists, scientists, musicians — imagine that they all just kept their stuff to themselves and hoped someone would stumble onto it.
No recording studios. No art galleries. No performances. Oh, and books too. Pompous, if you think about it.
Is that the ideal? Have you thought this through?
Comment by Daniel Miessler — 10/9/2007 @ 6:49 pm
Unfortunately I can’t submit content to Reddit. Not my own, not anyone else’s. I submit and it vanishes. It never shows up on the new page, it never gets any votes. I had noticed it for a while and decided to do a little experiment. I submitted something from my site and monitored my stats, not one person clicked on it. It wasn’t a fluke either. It happened several times. I created a new user name and tried with that one. Nothing. I even used said user name to up-vote my other username’s submission. The vote didn’t register. I’m not the only one this has happened to either.
Comment by Ryan — 10/10/2007 @ 10:48 am
[...] Nine Inch Nails is Label Free! Link 1, Link 2, Link 3 Google and Jaiku Poor Content: Submit Your Own .EDU Underground YouTube and AdSense ROBOBUGS! Apple: Leopard Finalized, [...]
Pingback by NNR #30 at Nerd News Radio — 10/10/2007 @ 5:49 pm
Some story in Digg, are duplicates, thats why the quailty is declining.
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