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http://blogs.sun.com/woodjr/date/20070215 Thursday February 15, 2007

Why is the Digg Community So Sensitive to Competition?

The Digg community is once again lashing out at a "shameless rip-off" site. This time their target is Yahoo, which has (in their own words) added "Digg-style voting" to their suggestion boards. There was a similar reaction months ago when Netscape.com re-launched itself as a voter-driven news portal.

Why do so many Digg users have a hair-trigger response against anyone who builds on Digg's ideas? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Imitation with due credit (as Yahoo provided in their blog post) is pretty-well beyond reproach.

Yes, Yahoo and Netscape took ideas from Digg. That's the way the world works. We build off of each others' ideas. If you can't accept that, you need to strip naked and move to some deserted cave. Every technology and idea we use today is a derivative of something which came before it.

If you think the "good guys" of the tech world sprang up from great new ideas, you're wrong (at least partially). The ideas may have been great, but they were never entirely new. So before you launch another campaign against a "shameless rip-off" of Digg, consider going after:

  • Linux, which shamelessly stole the design of UNIX.
  • Apache, which shamelessly stole the idea of serving web pages from Tim Berners-Lee.
  • Firefox, which shamelessly stole the idea of a graphical web browser from NCSA Mosaic.
  • Digg itself, which shamelessly stole the concept of voting from the ancient Greeks.
  • The paranoid members of the Digg community, who shamelessly stole the ideas of intolerance and isolationism from countless ancient tribes.

Yes, they're ridiculous examples. It's a ridiculous discussion. Building on the ideas of others is a fact of life. It's also a fact of Web 2.0, and it's time for lagging members of the Digg community to accept it.

Tags:

Posted at 10:04AM Feb 15, 2007 by Jamey Wood in Web 2.0  |  Comments[4]

Comments:

Couldn't agree with you more. A sizeable portion of the digg community just proved to the rest of the internet that they are mostly what we all secretly knew, childish pre-teen fanboi's. Not that digg were by any means the first people to use user-rated content, we all had "karma points" on our blogs years ago which you can equate to digg up/down and functioned just the same. The digg "voting system" is NOTHING new. What Yahoo is doing is something totally different. As I see so often on digg, I wish people had RTFA. If I worked for digg right now I'd be highly embarrassed to say the least!

Posted by tek on February 15, 2007 at 12:28 PM MST #

hey dumbass how bout you actually stfu b4 u statrt blabbering on when uve already missed the point.... it isnt about the voting or anything.... its about how the yahoo layout is nearly identical to that at digg same color scheme, same font styles/css the only difference is that it is from yahho...

Posted by u dumbass on February 15, 2007 at 01:11 PM MST #

Digg's opinions seem to be based on a herd mentality made up of lots of little children who seem to have no great intellect.

Posted by Joff on February 17, 2007 at 04:19 AM MST #

Digg is just a bunch of lonely, misinformed high school and college students that don't want anyone to take away the one thing that is so special to them. Why do you think lame Natalie Portman ass-shots (among other soft-core stories) in a short movie are among the highest dug during the week. This site really started losing itself when it actually sticks up for governments like Iran's over our own (no matter how you feel about our country, it's simply ridiculous).

Posted by Steve on September 29, 2007 at 09:29 AM MDT #

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