The Downfall Of Community Content

I’ve been subscribed to Digg’s front page RSS feed for a few months or so and more and more I’m just skipping over all of its articles. It seems that as Digg’s popularity grows, the quality of the content drops. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise – as more people enter the community, the community’s interests vary and the signal to noise ratio for a given person probably drops.  Even when the community’s interest doesn’t spread too wide, just the increase in the number of articles is likely to mean that readers skip articles more often.

So it is that I’m starting to seriously consider unsubscribing from Digg and just picking up a few of the common sources of the articles that interest me. For the most part I find myself far more interested in the individual blogs I’ve subscribed to than the news aggregator type sites like Digg.  Memeorandum never managed to interest me, Newsvine is clean and well thought out but seriously boring with the same rehash of content that’s flowing through everywhere else. None of these sites, which are often touted to help people find interesting new content, actually find anything new. Digg actually does the best at that with its constant stream of tutorials to do stuff that people have found, but unless I currently want to do that I really don’t need to find a tutorial for it.  When I need to know, I’ll google it.

What I’d like is for my RSS reader to tie in with Technorati or Feedster or someone, analyze the entries that I actually read (not just the ones that come in – I skip over more than half the crap that comes through my RSS reader) and suggest or automatically subscribe new potential sources of information. If it can filter out the stuff it knows I’m going to skip anyway that would be a bonus.

Then again, maybe I don’t need to find more sources anyway – the more stuff that comes through my RSS feeder the more of it I have to skip because I don’t have time.