Isolationism

My amigo MCM over at Push the Third Button Twice posted a reaction to an article on The Mu Life titled, Did You Read The Article? MCM raises an interesting point about how we shouldn’t judge books by their covers, or blogs by their fame (or lack thereof).

I think I’ve already stated my position on Digg users making worthless contributions to story discussion threads, so no argument there. I also agree with MCM’s conclusion: Blogs shouldn’t just be discounted because they’re “petite frites” compared to commercial news sites.

The example mentioned in the Mu Life article is compelling evidence in favour of the argument: People saw an image they don’t like for whatever reason, then drew their own (erroneous) conclusions about the story behind it, potentially causing needless damage to Firefox (or rather, its users’) reputation.

The problem, in my naïve opinion, has nothing to do with some wispy “meta data”, however; It has to do with the feeding frenzy typical to most Digg stories. An overwhelming number of stories submitted to social news sites (especially Digg, which I have criticised before elsewhere for its lack of editing) are to attract your attention to a piece of media: a video, a photo, or an ugly website, usually—then incites users to react. Right there, on the spot, without thinking it through, without reading the article a few times (if at all) to make sure you understood correctly, or whatever else—because if you get your 15 words in early, everyone else who reads the article after you’ve made your mark will see your post, too. And they have a point: I’ve personally seen hundreds of excellent posts on Slashdot get buried because the user was late to the discussion, and moderators have already moved on to new stories thinking the older stories are already all sorted out.

Compare the current process to a couple decades ago, when a story had to be a pretty big deal for you to want to pick up a pen and paper and write a letter to the editor about what you read; even if it did get published, the letter wouldn’t be appearing immediately beneath the article in question (or anywhere close to it for that matter, in neither time nor space); most readers probably wouldn’t bother to look. The quality of today’s emotionally-charged, immediate responses is only exacerbated by the lack of that selfsame editor deciding what responses to publish (and that, perhaps only after what you wrote has been edited, too).

You might argue that social news sites like Digg and Slashdot have their own user-moderated system for doing something close to the role above. My response is, “so what” if your comment gets buried because you said something dumb? The point of voting or moderating a post down on social news sites is near-meaningless—the stupid comment will already have been quoted and/or responded to several times over before the original offending message becomes buried, and more often than not, burying a poster only serves to attract more attention to the post in the first place.

I propose that if Digg and Slashdot were to enforce a mandatory “reaction” ban of 24 hours between reading a post and responding to it, I’m certain both the ratio of quality of the posts would go up and the number of (chiefly poor) responses would drop sharply. The problem is that Social News site designers seem to want to make it easier and (especially) faster to post knee-jerk reactions; the proof is in the pudding with the now-famous “Digg It” button.

Until someone builds a social networking site that encourages taking your time to “RTFA” and mull it over before hitting the reply button, you can keep expecting written responses to resemble street inverview-style reactions instead of learnèd intellectual discourse.