The lead story on Digg right now is "Rosetta@Home Distributed Folding Coming to Xbox 360?" I don't know about you, but I find that headline positively yawn-inspiring. I like the Xbox 360 and I like the Rosetta Stone, but I don't know about Rosetta@Home. "Distributed folding" makes me think of a laundry sweatshop—it's just not a captivating idea to me. But the arrival of a particular brand of distributed folding to local game machines excites many people, apparently, because they voted it to the number 1 spot on Digg.

Over on reddit, the hottest news item is "One woman fighting an army (pic)." Now there's a link that wants clicking. Maybe you disagree—there's no accounting for taste—vote me down if you think I'm weird. I think I'm not: I think the promise of a picture of a woman vs. an army plainly outranks the promise of... of some incomprehensible Rosetta-folding-thing embedded in an incomprehensible gerund-laden sentence.

Just below the news about folding is, "Microsoft prepping component to HDMI adapter?" The question mark tells us we're dealing with a rumor, I guess. You know, TVs are neat, especially the big new flat ones, and adapters greatly impact the quality of many display systems, yet I still just can't get excited about a whole article on a little electronic plug. What I'm struggling to understand: Do Diggers really care about this stuff, or is Digg just broken?

reddit and Digg are similar in concept. Presumably the technology behind the systems is largely identical. So why is it, when I browse reddit, that I quickly find myself engrossed, whereas when I browse Digg, I quickly find myself dozing?

I have no investment in either site. I don't care which is better. When I first sniffed around reddit and Digg a month ago, both intrigued me, and I divided my browsing time between them. In fact I rooted for Digg at first. It's prettier. Digg Labs rocks. The Digg button for my website worked effortlessly whereas the reddit button resizes oddly (I told reddit; they replied; they still haven't fixed it).

Then after a couple of weeks, I noticed something weird: whenever I browsed the news, I always ended up at reddit. I just liked it better. So I asked myself, like a man courting two women, liking them both, seeing that the one is prettier and nicer and has better long-term marriage potential and that the other is uglier and rougher, yet preferring the latter and being unable to account for his feelings—"Perhaps it's her informality, perhaps it's just the way she makes me laugh," he says—thus did I ask myself, "Why do I prefer reddit?"

It's the Little Things...

Here are some reasons.

(1) Digg stories bore. I find myself trolling through pages and pages of Digg stories and rarely clicking. On reddit I find about 60% of the headlines interesting. Reddit stories are, on average, more interesting than Digg stories.

(2) Reddit has a better information-per-eyefull ratio. On my monitor I can see 25 reddit headlines in one glance; on Digg I can see 6. And those 6 are clogged with Digg buttons, icons, various font colors and sizes, and a pointless story description. Why do we need a description? If you want to know if the story is interesting, just click, for crying out loud. All the little jinglies that make Digg attractive to newbies make it tedious for daily use.

(3) Digg Capitalizes Its Stories. Like That. Not always, but more than reddit. And somehow it puts me off. Digg headlines just don't scan as well as reddit headlines. Capitalization Makes Words Plod. Reddit headlines—usually, not always—scan more nicely.

(4) Categories stink. Digg asks story submitters to categorize each story. Reddit throws all stories into one big pile. You'd think categorization would be a good thing—divide and conquer and all—but in a democratic news recommendation service, categories defeat the purpose. What is Digg but a personalized, fuzzy categorization service? It makes rigid, human-picked categories redundant. It undermines the very thing Digg wants to do: automatically recommend news based on affinity. I wonder how much of the reason Digg's stories stink lies in its recommendation algorithm hobbling along on the crutch of manually-selected categories. Maybe if Digg got rid of the crutch, their algorithm would get better.

(5) Digg stories are harder to submit. Here's a final complaint, and it applies only to people who submit stories, but I wonder how much it feeds into the overall quality of Digg. To submit a story to reddit, you type in a headline, then click submit. That's it. To submit a story to Digg, you type in a headline, then a description. Typing the description evokes a feeling somewhere between stage fright and frustration, as you struggle to summarize for the public in less than 350 characters. Assuming you make it through the intimidation, you now have to pick a category among a number of arbitrary options. Then, before you submit, Digg informs you that your story is old hat and asks whether you really want to submit it. You insist you do, then lean back scratching your goatee: Why all the hurdles? Do Digg developers feel they need a filter to cut back on the number of stories users submit? Well, that would be sensible—except, isn't the whole point of a democratic news service to let users decide if a story is worthwhile? It's like putting a surgical mask on a baleen whale. Why do you need a filter? The whole system is a filter.

There you have five guesses why Digg works less well than reddit. But you know, these problems are really quite minor. Could they really have such a large effect on how these services ultimately operate? Although I'm sure there are many other differences that have equally big—or bigger—effects, even these five could seriously impact the overall service. That's because Digg and reddit are feedback systems—glorious feedback systems.

Feedback

Recommendation databases like Digg and reddit are complex, highly recursive, organic systems. Like rain forests, playgrounds, and stock markets, Digg and reddit consist of myriad feedback loops. Stories beget votes beget news beget comments beget stories beget comments beget votes—and so on and on. And wherever you have feedback, you have the potential for what we might call Resonance Cascades [ah, the memories]. In a feedback system, small initial variations collide and expand and fold [argh, the memories] back upon themselves to create massive higher-level effects. Yes, I'm talking about chaos theory: Butterfly in Bangladesh Brings Blizzard to Bangor and all that jazz.

So very, very tiny differences in the implementations of Digg and reddit can manifest in huge differences in the output of the overall systems. A cool story about Man-Eating Tigers! that might bubble to the top of one service might get buried/downmodded into oblivion in the other. Do you blame the story writer? Do you blame the algorithm? Do you blame the users? Yes! All of the above! Because all of them mosh together in complex resonance patterns. What you've been saying since the '60s is finally true: the system is to blame.

The Masses are the Message

Of course, the system administrators have more control than anyone. Digg can still improve—so can reddit—so can the brand new service that will destroy them all, which some high school student in Sweden will invent next Tuesday. If I were Digg, you know what I'd do: get rid of categories and descriptions, Kill Capitalization In Headlines, and tighten up the story list. Those changes would improve matters greatly. But would it be enough?

Eventually, maybe it would. Or maybe not. Because now, see, Digg is more than just an algorithm and an interface. Digg is also an Established User Base. And that user base likes what it likes—likes what Digg has trained it to like. What if what it likes is kinda stupid? What if Digg improves things and its users don't like it, or can't cope? What if the system can no longer resist the fluttering of all those butterflies?

I've been hosting Google ads on my site for the last year or so. I was hoping to make a little dosh from the traffic. I stuck the ads at the top of each page, right where Google recommends they should go, hoping to maximize the ads' impact. I thought I might earn a hundred bucks or so every few months. I was way off.

I've decided that for a site like mine, Google ads are not worth the screen space they occupy. I get decent traffic for a personal blog site. In the past year I've had one $100 pay out—that's it. Since that payout arrived in June 2006, I've had nearly 80,000 visitors, but only $71 in earnings. By the same proportions, if I had a million visitors in that time, I would have earned less than $900. If I wanted to live on ad revenue from my site, then to make $4000 a month I'd need 4.5 million visitors per month. How many sites get that kind of traffic?

I was happy to let Google have its little lot on my site until a couple of weeks back. That's when one of my blog posts went to the top 20 on reddit. I had 13,000 visitors in less than 24 hours. How much did it earn me? $1.69.

I keep my site as an outlet for my games, music, art, and thought. I don't keep it to make money; the Google AdSense thing was just a bonus. So if AdSense gets in the way of people enjoying the site, it simply isn't worth it. I'd rather have an extra 100 visitors than an extra 100 pennies. Frankly, I'd rather have an extra 1 visitor than an extra 100 pennies.

I didn't get rid of AdSense, but I relegated it to the bottom of the page for most of my pages. I'm sure Google would cluck their tongues: "That's going to murder your CTR ratings," they'd say. So what? A tenth of not much is not much. For my site's size and purposes, AdSense hasn't earned its keep.

I'm taking a journalism course right now, and I've just published my first article—albeit in an online publication. (Not that that's inferior or anything—chill out already.) It's a review of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Chicken with Plums, which came out last November. It's a good book, but not as good as her earlier Persepolis autobiographical graphic novels.