OK, sure, this will definitely come out culturally elitist, but the phenomenon known as digg.com is yet another example of the principle of mediocrity in capitalist economies. (Or, for the more politically correct minded, perhaps we can call it the principle of democracy.) Like Walmart, the American public school system, Microsoft Windows, and our pathetic dependence on hydrocarbons for fuel, the “good enough” is the enemy of the “best” and, contrary to what Social Darwinists would have you believe, laissez faire capitalism leads to championing the mediocre.
What brings me to this thought is this random post by Mark Pilgrim, renowned A-list blogger, who states that Digg users are dumber than goldfish. If you thought that Slashdot was bad, you ain’t seen nothing until you read the comments on Digg.
Now granted, maybe there is some hidden confounding factor that I’m missing. Maybe there’s a causative agent that compels mental midgets to comment on Digg posts, but whenever I make the mistake of trying to read some of the comments, I begin to mourn the sorry state of our school system and the continual stupefication and generalized mental retardation that our society apparently likes to maintain and seems to value so much. (I mean, look at the Bush Administration, need I say more?) I’m not even talking about being ignorantly offensive in a politically incorrect way. I’m talking about severe lapses in logic and complete ignorance about how the real world actually works. I mean, maybe the average Digg poster is like 14 years old, white and male?
Anyway, what might be nice is some way for users to mark stories as duplicates. I think it would be pretty easy functionality to add, and, sure, like the act of Digging itself, it can easily be abused, but at least it can prevent this maddening sense of dejá vù </rant>