Business Pundit

I read this post yesterday and found the project interesting because I have done something similar, which I will explain in a minute. You see, I like the idea behind Reddit, and I like Digg too, but when I see that Yahoo may buy Digg, I just laugh. Why would they consider it? There are too many negatives with all these types of sites. I use many of them regularly to find interesting things, but I still like the Slashdot model better.

So here are my complaints.
1. It's the same crap over and over. Things keep moving up and down the lists, so if you check in multiple times a day, you keep seeing the same articles, sometimes for days at a time.

2. It isn't time sensitive. Suddenly, 5 year old web pages on some esoteric topic become popular. That just doesn't happen on other news sites, and is surprising given that Reddit claims to be "what's new online."

3. It's a network effect. Being popular makes you more popular. People read the popular stuff, like it, and vote it up, thus making it more popular. That's stupid. These sights aren't always finding the best stuff. There is just a certain luck in hitting the threshold to get over the hump and let the network effects kick in.

4. The same link, submitted at different times, might get different votes. I've seen things in the "new" queue that have been there before, only this time they get a totally different score.

5. The technology is no big deal. Not that it's a piece of cake to write that kind of app, but it isn't difficult for a good programmer to mimic the behavior of one of these sites.

6. The audience is too techie. Hey, I like much of what is posted there. I'm all into A.I., so I like finding Lisp stuff on Reddit. But seriously, how many people know what Lisp is? It's popular on Reddit because Reddit was written in Lisp, and thus attracted a group of users that are interested in it.

This is really the key point. These sites, and almost all this Web 2.0 stuff are being used by the same small group of techies and college kids that move from one site to another to check it out and play with the latest thing. Neither site accurately reflects what people want to or should be reading because the user demographics are skewed. In the real world, does anyone care about an emacs language mode creation tutorial? No. But it's on the front page of Reddit.

I like business news and business blogs. So one of my complaints is that these sights only have a handful of good posts on business at any given time (and they usually have a tech slant). So, I created a bunch of different Reddit accounts and submitted various business sites and articles over a two week period (I even used various IP addresses). I submitted stuff I thought was good, stuff I didn't think was good, tech biz, non-tech biz, a little of everything. Out of several dozen posts, only two ended up with positive scores, and those just barely. Most were heavily voted down, even though they were the kinds of articles business executives would presumably like (based on the kind of stuff you read in the WSJ). There just aren't many business people using these sites. It also explains the low participation rates in spinoffs like Stock Digg.

When I look at all this new media, web 2.0, etc. stuff, I can't help but think back to Charlie's article about how we are talking to ourselves. I think he's right, and I think he has realized it before many others.

Part of the reason we launched Jotzel was to offer an alternative – a user driven site focused primarily on business news and a complement to the CotC. We used Scoop because it doesn't have the "popularity breeds popularity" quality that these other services have. We are well aware that most techies won't like it, and that our biggest problem is figuring out how to cater to the business crowd – many of whom still use the web just for email, google, and ebay.

I wouldn't be surprised if you see a proliferation of these types of sites. Believe it or not, there are lots of people in this world that are interested in things other than technology. (And if you decide to set up one, I would highly recommend Scoop!)