Digg Vs Slashdot

I have been slashdotted and also dugg. Now I am curious to see who actually wins the race. To win a target, we need a goal. For my review, the goal would be user satisfaction in all aspects on these two websites. This review will be as unbiased as possible and I hope it is useful to those who want a quick comparision.

Before I start comparing it is important to be familiar with the history of both websites.

Slashdot History
Slashdot was started back in 1997 by Rob Malda who was still in college then. You can find the chronological timeline of slashdot on wikipedia. I am going to mention some things that may add some weightage to this topic. The name was derived to confused people. You say the address as h t t p colon slash slash slashdot dot org. Slashdot has close to a million registered users and it is currently owned by Open Source Technology Group.

Linux/ unix content is the main focus for slashdot but most users who hit slashdot are on a windows based machine which is ironical. Slashdot users are called slashdotters and the popular slashdot effect has taken down many servers due to its high traffic volume when many users try to access the same website concurrently. Some news that gets published on slashdot is claimed to be inaccurate for several reasons.

Digg History
From Wikipedia : Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson (who serves as CEO), all of whom currently play an active role in the management of the site.

“We started working on developing the site back in October 2004,” Kevin Rose told Richard MacManus of ZDNet. “We started toying around with the idea a couple of months prior to that, but it was early October when we actually started creating what would become the beta version of digg. The site launched to the world on December 5th 2004.”

Digg is a website with an emphasis on technology and science news. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. Digg has over 100,000 registered users. Like slashdot, digg users often cause digg effect which has taken down a number of servers including my own.

How Slashdot Works
Slashdot works like a moderated blog. Users submit the articles with the appropriate category, title and the snippet of the story which would contain a link to the main story. Moderators have the autonomous power to either pick the article submitted or to dump it, no questions asked. The accepted articles are pushed to the frontpage in small increments of time. Slashdot users comment on the article and usually the articles are in hundreds. All the comments are moderated by a few temporary moderators. The commenting system on slashdot is the most popular feature of slashdot as far as the users are concerned.

This is the main steam of slashdot but along with this, it has other child processes like reviews for books and movies, interviews and ask slashdot.

How Digg Works
Digg is similar to slashdot in the kind of news it seeks but different in many other ways. Digg has a voting system which allows users to rate the submitted articles and not the moderators. But I do believe that the moderators will have the final call on pushing the articles to the frontpage. The users have the option of reporting the article if they find it inappropriate or if it is a duplicate story. Those stories find it hard to make it to the frontpage. A new commenting system has been introduced which uses the concept of nesting. Users can vote positively or negatively on a comment and after a comment reaches certain negative points is buried.

So far everything is the background that I needed to start comparing these two mega websites. Now the real deal. I will be comparing the five major aspects namely 1. Content 2. Design 3. Presentation 4. Comments and 5. Features. At the end, there will be some tips for both websites which are important for a user in my book.

Content

The most important aspect of any website is the content. If the content is good, the website does well.

Slashdot would have tons of articles being posted everyday and many of them would be duplicates with different wordings. How can the users know if a story has been submitted or not? They won’t if it is not on the frontpage already. The moderators job is to pick the best submitted article and the best original source. The moderator’s word would be final on whether the article will make it to the frontpage or not. I find this very biased and opinionated. This is where digg scores over slashdot. Digg doesn’t bring out the opinion of one person but a vast array of people. Democracy is more preferable over autonomy.

So, in essence slashdot carries only the best of the stories i.e frontpage stories. Digg on the other hand contains stories that make it to the frontpage along with the ones that don’t make it, both these stories are available to a regular user. Hence, digg is more richer than slashdot in terms of the stories that it possesses.

Another question comes to my mind. How do you know which story is more important over the other? A story which might seem important to you and might be of no interest to another person. So, there might be some people who would be losing out on information through slashdot.

What is the purpose of these kind of websites? My answer would be to share news and resources with other users. By restricting the articles, has slashdot done any justice to people who seek news and resources? My props to digg as all the data is available in one place or another. By searching, a user can find appropriate stories that he would be interested in.

Design

This is just not the looks of the website but also the ease of usability. In this section I will be analyzing the looks and usability part by part.

We are in a time when ajax is making its stamp on most websites and we are getting used to those websites that use ajax and look modern. So, it is important for the websites to be on par with the users’ need.

Lets look at slashdot. There are mainly two colors, which is good and they have a bunch of images placed in a sort of collage manner on the header which may be cool for some people. The left column is so busy which makes me nauseous, it is very cluttered. The right column is as busy as the left one and one gets an impression that not much thought went behind the whole placement of modules here. The center column has bold titles(which is good) and hold on, why in the world is it in italics? According to a certain survey, people find it easier to read when it is normal and harder to read when italicized. Maybe somebody didn’t do their homework well enough. What about those images next to each post? They look so kiddish to me. Slashdot looks like a website put up by people who haven’t had experience in professional web design. While I say this, I realize that the same design has existed for a long time and at that time it was the state of the art and now it is the state of laughter. So, all these said, slashdot should try to improve their design to please the current generation.

Digg on the other hand has a very neat looking design which is laid out pretty well. The top bar is very clean with minimum links. The front page has links with different sizes based on the priority. All the links being so cleanly laid out, it is hard not to find a link that I need. In other words, navigation on the digg website is fairly simple. If the pope was alive, he probably could navigate through the site without much fuss.

I do understand that the current digg design is its second since the website was conceived couple years back. This change of design shows something very important. The developers behind digg are constantly active in improving digg from all aspects which is a big factor for people to trust websites such as these.

Digg clearly triumphs over slashdot when it comes to design.

Presentation

Let me define what presentation means in the first place. It is the way the news / data is presented on the website.

The old warhorse first. An example of slashdot’s presentation is provided on the right. The title is bold and clear which gives us the ability scan through many such articles in a short time. I like the bold letters over a darker background. Good readability there. Just noting that the heading is not clickable. The next line has the editor’s name who posted the article along with time and date. The story contains the name of the person who submitted the article / links along with the article. The link to the original article is found somewhere in the short snippet provided by the poster. So, if I need to follow the link, I need to find it first which means that I need to search within the article. This is a nuisance for those people who want to cut the chase and get to the source asap. There are times when a snippet has multiple links which could be misleading. The image on the right acts as an alien part of the website. It doesn’t really mix with anything on the website. The developers haven’t taken some time to polish it so that it matches the website. After the article comes the comments which is very generic.

But my concern on the presentation is the italics used for the article. Italics are not the easiest to read compared to other types of font formats. Plus, it is a practice to use italics to emphasize parts of the article. Here, the whole article is emphasized which could be distracting and at the same time annoying.

And now the young blood. The very first thing that you see is the number of votes(diggs) a particular link has received. Then you have the title of the article in big letters and is CLICKABLE. So, by clicking the article you actually end up going to the destination link, how cool is that? The next line has the name of the person who submitted this article and also the original URL. So, you know at least a part of the url before you make the click. There is the description of the article following right after which gives you a brief synopsis of the link. This is followed by the number of comments and a feedback section where users can actually complain about certain things in the article that will be discussed later in the review. As long as one can see the title clearly, the link to the article clearly distinguished and the description being visible without any funky formatting.

So, in all essence, the purpose of any of these websites is to present the data and as we have already examined there are more than 1 way of doing so. I definitely feel that digg presents the data better than slashdot which is very helpful if you are the kind of person who scans articles just by their headlines and the gist of the article.

Comments

Comments is the state of a website which defines the activity on a particular website. The lack of comments would give a website an impression that is just as good as dead. Commenting has become a part and parcel for most websites these days.

Slashdot is extremely popular for its comments. Slashdot users love to comment on it. Interesting articles could receive around 1000 comments and commenting system keeps people coming back to the website.

Commenting engine comes in different forms. It can either be nested, threaded or flat. This is a good feature to have so that the users can decide which one they are more comfortable with. Since there are hundreds of comments, moderation is not simple. Wikipedia does a good job of explaining the process of moderation at slashdot.

From Wikipedia : To prevent abusive comments, a moderation system has been implemented whereby every comment posted (including those posted anonymously) can be “moderated” up or down by semi-randomly chosen moderators, changing the post’s score likewise. Moderation points added to a comment are also added to a user’s karma score. Having high karma gives added bonuses to users, such as the ability to autopost at higher starting values. Conversely, users with low karma have penalties imposed on them. People that post comments designed to get more karma, for example mirroring a linked article, are sometimes referred to as karma whores. Those who can moderate are selected by their karma score and number of meta moderations (and maybe other criteria). Slashdot editors, including Rob Malda (”CmdrTaco”), can moderate limitlessly. Moderator access for non-editors is time limited (to a few days) and the number of ‘mod points’ one gets is limited (to a max of 5 points at the time of this writing).

A given comment can have any integer score from ?1 to +5, and Slashdot users can set a personal threshold where no comments with a lesser score are displayed. (For example, a person browsing the comments at a threshold of 1 will not see comments with a score of ?1 or 0 but will see all others.) Moderators have been known to abuse the ability to increase or decrease the score of comments, and in some cases entire threads of comments have been marked down to ?1. Subsequently, a meta-moderation system was implemented to moderate the moderators and help contain abuses.

I feel that the commenting system on slashdot is a huge success and users love commenting and getting feedbacks.

Digg has users comment on posts but the number of comments is not comparable to that of slashdot. Although digg has a big community of users, the users are not crazy about commenting on articles. I have found articles on digg’s frontpage that haven’t received a single comment yet.

Digg on the other hand started with flat comments and now they used nested comments that have scores associated with them. This is very similar to that of slashdot, the only difference is that it is visually more appealing. Another major difference with the comments is that each user is a moderator, each user can give a thumbs up or thumbs down for each comment. This is a better option than a few moderators because democracy is upheld.

But if I have to pass a judgement, I would lean more towards slashdot for commenting since the community is so active commenting actively. Things might change for digg in the future, who knows?

Features

If I go deeper in this topic, I would require more than 1 page to analyze each feature. I will try to be brief and stick to the major features on both websites.

In slashdot, there are a number of user features which are quite attractive. Any user can maintain his/her journal. A user can have friends and foes on slashdot which raises some eyebrows. It is a nice feature to possess for an interactive website. The messaging system, although not a two way communication is still weighty.

Slashdot features different subdomains which carry different topics. Some examples are apple, book reviews, games etc. This is a very important part of segregating the news according to our interests. My favorite one is the ask slashdot. It is a forum in which you would ask a question and people would answer your question/discuss on it. It is similar in nature to Google Scholar. Slashdot is popular for the polls it runs as well.

Slashdot not only brings the news but they know how to transform the traffic monetarily. Slashdot (OSTG) owns several services which are advertised on slashdot and it is a good smart strategy. I don’t blame them.

Digg may not be abundant in features compared to slashdot but they have some unique features as well. You could segregate your dugg articles, submitted articles and commented articles. You can view the same three sections for all other users. This is annoying at times. Digg tends to be more Christian in making friends and not foes. The articles that your friends digg are marked to distinguish from others. There is a section which displays your personal profile along with your ranking on digg and interestingly enough, the number of times people have viewed your personal profile.

The feature that I like the most on digg is the Digg Spy. If you want to know what is currently hot on digg and what is getting dugg a lot, you need to check this out. It is like a stock market screen which keeps moving with the number of diggs and the article names. It even shows you if an article has been reported or not.

Verdict
I have analyzed the two websites in five different fields and it is time to call a winner. One can be sure that it won’t be a tie. Slashdot has clearly picked up more credit in the area of commenting and features. Comments is solely attributed to the ever active users of slashdot and the features available are just too incredible.

Digg has thumped slashdot in its content, design and presentation which are the major parts of any given website. The credit for the quantity and quality content should go to the digg users who submit in abundance. The brains behind digg has done a great job by adapting to the generation by chopping and changing the design for the best. Kudos for using the latest technology in the world that thrives on changing technology. It requires some basic thinking to come up with a good presentation of data and I would give full credit to those people who came with this kind of presentation.

And Finally…
Digg is clearly a winner over slashdot even though digg is so young in terms of years. Digg has triumphed over slashdot in more regions. But, there are some shortcomings in digg which I want to address.

Feature I feel that should be implemented on digg

These are some of the things that I think will improve digg quite significantly. This coupled with more users within a year could easily see digg surpass slashdot in all the five departments. I might have sounded like a big digg fan boy. I tried to be unbiased and the truth is that digg really rocks.