Are Digg Commenters Dumb?

Posted on April 30, 2007
Filed Under web 2.0 |

Okay, shameless inflamatory post title.

The issue at hand is Dare Obasanjo’s post about Digg vs. Slashdot comment threads, and by extension the incentive system differences that each site uses.

At first blush, the naive conclusion could be that Slashdot readers are more intelligent or at least more atticulate than Digg readers. However I just read Freakonomics so I’ve recently been thinking a lot about how incentive systems influence human behavior. After using both sites, I’ve come to the conclusion that the default settings on Digg encourages lower quality comments while the Slashdot defaults encourages higher quality comments.

It occured to me that the issue isn’t the content of comments on each respective site, it’s the tone. I tune out rants in comment threads, unless they are exceptionally well informed rants. The challenge is sorting through the rants to find the good ones. The Digg method of thumbs up/down for comments, as well as the source articles, only goes so far, what is required are additional subjective measures for tone and bias.

It also wouldn’t hurt to have a "was this comment helpful yes/no" radio button for instead of simple diggs, which more than anything else just measure whether or not you agree with something, which is just another way of measuring conformance to your personal biases.

With new rating tools I could filter a comment thread and make it more managable, for example, filtering out based on tone but leaving biased comments intact, and then sorting based on number of Diggs and date. Services like The Hive Group could build visualization tools on top of Digg that would go well beyond the data in the source articles and into the richness of content in the comment threads themselves.

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