Cowboy Caleb the liberal arts, grown-up stuff & random mischief

In Review: Editor Moderation Vs Digg (Asia)

Once upon a time, there were suggestions that Tomorrow.sg adopt the digg model. As one of the editors of Tomorrow.sg, I wasn’t exactly opposed to moving from an editor moderated model to the Digg.com model where the readers vote to decide what gets published on the main page. After all, that meant less work for me (moderating is not all that cracked up as it’s made out to be).

My answer to that was “ummmm… not now”. I thought our the general attitude of our blogosphere wasn’t encouraging and we didn’t have the critical mass required to make it work.

Anyway, two Asian digg styled sites launched – Spymy and Sigg. I’m going to talk about Spymy because it had a strong following at its inception and has been around for 8 months now.

Important Disclaimer:
I am not making a personal attack on Spymy, if my words offend then I am sorry but I am just using the only site I know of that is well known and uses the Digg model, plus its entry prompted many to predict the demise of Tomorrow.sg. All views are my own and do not reflect those of the other editors of Tomorrow.sg

Although Spymy uses the digg voting model, hardly anybody participates. A quick glance at the number of votes for each article to be published on the frontpage is below 15 votes! The quality of the content, which should increase due to the collective wisdom of many many people doesn’t seem to be kicking in. I’m not sure if any of us think “Even Wolf mad about pretty sexy women – Passionata Lingerie Ads” is even vaguely interesting or should belong on the site.

The articles in the voting queue are also equally inane or lack quality.

And then I took a look at SpyMy’s web statistics. Update: The peak in Feb coincides with the ‘Tammy’ incident, which was featured prominently on SpyMy and is the first, second & third most popular stories evar on the site.. After that, traffic went downhill all the way…

Visits
Total 238,835
Average Per Day 284
Average Visit Length 2:37
Last Hour 11
Today 138
This Week 1,989

Page Views
Total 591,301
Average Per Day 525
Average Per Visit 1.8
Last Hour 17
Today 214
This Week 3,675

So based on the dismal traffic stats above, we now know why nobody is voting and the quality of articles is diminishing. It’s like a vicious cycle isn’t it? You need traffic to increase the number of articles being submitted and people voting. When you don’t get the traffic, everything just goes to the dogs.

My conclusion is that Spymy’s plan to dominate with the digg model has gone off-course. It’s just not working. The root of the problem is the lack of user participation. The irony is that the Digg model is all about user participation.

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I think Tomorrow.sg is a unique entity. All the conditions for it to succeed were correct when it launched, and all the stars continue to align for it to continue being a success. The editor moderated mode is working out just fine. The quality of articles have increased dramatically but at the same time we still publish crap to even things out. The editors still hate each other but some how manage to work together on a daily basis.

If Tomorrow.sg were to move to a digg model soon, it’d probably work out fine. And by soon, I mean in a couple of years :)

Next week: “What happened to BlogsMalaysia?”

BlogsMalaysia?

Hoho. Don’t even start. :P

Spymy is just dismal. The layout is not intuitive. To see the queue, you have to hunt for the link.

And the straw that broke the camel’s back was when the asinine idiot behind spymy went around posting comments in EVERYONE’S blogs about how they can download Tammy’s video on spymy. And the fool left a link right on the front page, on the top “Download Tammy’s video here!” for months.

With someone like that, and the low quality of articles as you have seen for yourself, killed it.

Why not take a leaf from Netscape’s book and do a bit of both? Have editorial content as well as user-voted content.

Difference between Spymy and Tomorrow.sg is that the latter already has a very established, built-in audience/visitors, while Spymy attempted to ‘introduce’ the Digg model to people. I think Tomorrow.sg has a better chance of converting to a Digg system, however, that would really go against the purpose of the entire site. That’s kinda like seeing BoingBoing or Slashdot suddenly changing systems and becoming Digg clones. The Internet definitely has space for both kinds of sites.

Although, I don’t know, perhaps put in a point system for readers to vote on featured articles? I mean, even if readers cannot decide WHAT is featured there, they can at least say whether they like it or not. But then, it’s not entirely necessary, I guess.

(have no idea why my comments on Wordpress entries always get eaten these days when I post via Firefox, so I’m reposting)

The difference between Spymy and Tomorrow.sg is that the latter already has a very established, built-in audience/visitors, while Spymy attempted to ´introduce´ the Digg model to people. I think Tomorrow.sg has a better chance of converting to a Digg system, however, that would really go against the purpose of the entire site. That´s kinda like seeing BoingBoing or Slashdot suddenly changing systems and becoming Digg clones. The Internet definitely has space for both kinds of sites.

Although, I don´t know, perhaps put in a point system for readers to vote on featured articles? I mean, even if readers cannot decide WHAT is featured there, they can at least say whether they like it or not. But then, it´s not entirely necessary, I guess.

The fool that left the Tammy video link on the front page, I guess that would be that idiot Shaolin Tiger- noted shit stirrer and rabid xx arch enemy. If so, no one should be surprised by the dismal quality of spymy.

was thinking of rotating of 2 groups of editors? probably alternate month. but yeah, i gotta say that Digg’s style is abit.. unorganised. new users may find it hard to navigate.

-lance.

interesting.

That was a good review on the moderation vs digg model. The keyword ‘participation’.

When I made the suggestion, my primary concerns was on the self regulation nature of the Digg model vs the interest of certain tomorrow.sg committee’s personal interest.

To clear things up, I would still rather have the current tomorrow.sg moderated model if that meant that switching to Digg’s model may suffer the same fate as Spymy or Sigg.

All of ya can count on me to abuse my omnipotent powers of moderation :D

what happened to blogs malaysia? is it still running.

[yah, im too lazy to check myself coz i dont have the link anyways]