Ramblings, v.2

I’m just tired of it.  I’ve had it in my Google Reader account for a couple years.  Every day, there are more and more stories getting pumped into the main RSS feed.  More and more stories are mostly crap.  Check out this screenshot:

I remind you, these are the stories that made the front page.  As in, enough people “dugg” these articles that Digg’s fanciful, mysterious algorithm decided it was important to foist upon everyone.  Let’s take a gander at that list and try to determine why they made the front page. 

Strip Search of 13-Year-Old for Advil Ruled Unconstitutional

Horny teenage boys see “strip search” and “13-Year-Old” and immediately digg it.  Commie and hippy left-wingers see something about a pharmaceutical and the word “unconstitutional” and immediately get a Down-With-The-Man stiffy and smack the digg button.  Bam, front page.

Cute Girl: “You know, I’m really just a geek inside” [COMIC]

Starts with “Cute Girl”.  ‘Nuff said.

Analysts: 150 U.S. Banks Nationwide May Fail Next Year

Basic fear-mongering at work here.  Yes, it’s possible, but hyperbole gets you everywhere, including the Digg front page.

Redskins Football Team Allowed to Keep Racist Name

Ok, seriously.  Racist?  The team’s name is no more racist than calling crackers (the snack food) crackers.  The author puns his way through the short article: “A group of Native Americans went on the warpath then went to the courtroom…”  The judge took the right stand and basically told the plaintiffs they waited too long to look for the payout.  The best part: Sports Illustrated commissioned a poll that ended up showing that 75% of the Native Americans asked don’t mind the team’s name.  Thankfully, the court system denied this idiot of his payday.  Too bad the same court couldn’t have handled Nintendo’s controller suit.

10 (More) Pieces of Incredible Transforming Furniture [PICS]

Please.  This is the same 10 More I saw last week.  And the week before that.  And two weeks before that posted on College Humor.

Bush is Burning the World to the Ground

No, he’s not.  Has he picked up a flamethrower?  Ordered napalm dropped from our geosynchronous satellites?  Nope, pretty sure he hasn’t.  Although I didn’t even read the digg summary of the article, I assume the original writer invokes the Goreacle’s sacrosanct Global Warming (which doesn’t exist, btw).  C’mon, get some facts before you digg trash like this.

Develpors [sic] using unfair practices in the Apple App Store

First, does no one use spell check?  Second, I read this article the day before at TUAW.  Old.

Give Me #3 Value Meal, Super Size, With An Order of Linux

Ok, this one I actually remember reading.  I didn’t see it posted anywhere else I normally check for a couple days.  First good article in the list.

How To Beat The Claw Game

Man, this one (like the Claw Game), has been beaten to death.  Just Google it.

Turns out that Give Me #3 article is the only article I actually read from this whole list.  However, did it enrich my life?  Not really.  It just made me a little more disgusted with Best Buy for trying to sell Ubuntu for $20.  Made me more disgusted with the average consumer for not knowing better.  And, I saw it on other sites I regularly read anyway a couple days later.

Why does this piss me off?  Every time I check GReader, the unread digg story count is over 100.  I normally check it at 6:30 am, 11 am, 4 pm, and between 8 and 10 pm.  That’s over 400 stories to (pardon the pun) dig through every day for only a pinch-full (less than a handful) of worthwhile articles.

Here’s the best part: about once every couple weeks, a story bubbles up about how broken Digg’s algorithm is.  Here’s an article I found with a simple google search about it.  Here’s another.  And another.  And another.  And another.  The results just keep going.  Look, kudos to K-Rose and the rest of their team.  Digg pretty much launched Revision3, and quite a few of their shows rock.

I’m just tired of Digg.  Too many stories, too little quality.  Digg needs to implement some sort of maximum diggs per time period limiter to stop people from just digging at the first three words of the title.  That might actually make some of these snot-nosed bumblefarts from digging anything with “girl” in the title.

I chucked Digg into its own folder in my GReader account a week ago, and I’ve only opened it once.  Accidentally.

Good riddance.

ross rant-o-matic