Digg's Devolution

WRITES John Gruber:

Digg sends a tremendous amount of traffic to sites that make it to the top of their front page, but it’s the worst kind of traffic: mindless, borderline illiterates. Good riddance, really.

That last sentence refers to the lovely message that he's coded to greet all Digg users who're viewing Daring Fireball when the new DiggBar is framing the page.

Me, I hate the DiggBar. Hated it from the moment it first appeared at the top of my browser window. I tend to use Digg only as a directional tool that points me to headlines that don't appear in my regular RSS feeds, and so I resent the cocoon that Digg attempts to create by framing external sites. To turn off the DiggBar for yourself, look under Settings > Viewing Preferences on your Digg account.

While I'm on the subject, I suppose it's worth mentioning that the DiggBar isn't the only reason I'm beginning to question the utility of Digg altogether. Gruber's description of the traffic that Digg generates is sadly becoming true in more and more cases; the site's only original content, the user comments, is a torrent of poorly spelled diatribes waxing indignant about the sensationalist headlines to articles (usually submitted by a small cabal of users led by MrBabyMan) their authors haven't bothered to read.

If one of these diatribes should appeal to the mob, woe betide anyone who holds a different view. It doesn't take an awful lot to rile these users who view themselves as advanced, individualistic, twenty-first century, tech-literate types into showing their nasty, juvenile, tribal, primitive sides. So as not to make each visit to Digg cause for outright despair, I often have to avoid reading the comments altogether, and that, I'm afraid, is a sure sign that a site has devolved into a din of arrogance and arbitrary agitation and is no longer worth visiting. Good riddance, really.