Marco.org

I saw this widget on a blog tonight.

Nine of the ten stories are list posts — useless “10 best”, “10 worst”, “10 scariest”, “10 biggest” posts made for Digg-bait and quick skimming. List posts are the McDonald’s of online writing: they require no thought, provide no intellectual value, and guarantee lots of cheap traffic and comments.

I can hardly even listen to Diggnation anymore, previously one of my favorite podcasts, because the “stories” are so inane and useless. This is every Diggnation episode now:

• (long intro, description of this episode’s alcohol)
• “Hey, here’s a funny video about cats!”
• “Guy gets hit in the crotch with lightsaber by 5-year-old”
• (commercials)
• (stupid emails)

Digg’s current state of affairs is just sad. They’ve hit a wall of mediocrity and community isolation. I can’t imagine that their traffic is growing significantly. All attempts to broaden Digg’s appeal have failed — the fundamental idea simply doesn’t scale beyond a single narrow userbase. They can’t go anywhere else with this.

No wonder they’re trying to sell it. They know it’s time to move on.