Kragen:
Thank you for that timely note articulately condemning the practice
of efficiently drinking in emotionally stimulating tidbits of news.
I used to read slashdot.org, and I sometimes still read
news.google.com, and I think those two sites have many of the
negative characteristics that you ascribe to reddit and digg.
A better recommendation system, and a "network" view that's less
focused on links that got posted in the last N hours, would be
helpful.
This sounds a bit like people maintaining "home pages" which contain
links, along with description and organization, to other things that
they are interested in.
However, viewing people's "home pages" isn't a very good way to
explore networks. Why not? In my opinion it has almost nothing to
do with the underlying technical architecture of the Web and HTML
pages -- it has to do with formatting.
You have to adjust to a new layout, colors, fonts, sizes, etc. with
every click.
In my opinion, this is the chief advantage that Facebook has over
blogs -- people don't have as much freedom to choose their own layout
and graphic design on Facebook.
In fact, in 1995, home pages and proto-blogs had a lot more of this
quality than they did in 2005, because in the interim HTML was
extended to allow more and more creative expression by page authors.
It was primarily this network of home pages that gave rise to google,
when it massaged and compressed the information using PageRank and
presented navigation to it in a uniform layout.
Regards,
Zooko
