like, you know, totally

December 19, 2006 9:32 AM

iliketotallyloveitis what you get if you apply the digg algorithm to stuff. Users submit their favorite stuff, new or old, and if enough other members agree with its awesomeness their favorite gets posted to the front page (along with where to buy it, of course).
posted by mendel (16 comments total)

Currently it's a bit random because it takes few votes to promote a post, but it sounds promising.
posted by mendel at 9:32 AM on December 19, 2006

I remember seeing a site like this recently, where people voted on the 'best thing' and the more votes it got, the more space it got on a grid on the main page. I remember wikipedia was the most popular thing at the time.

I can't remember the name of the site, though.
posted by delmoi at 9:41 AM on December 19, 2006

Kind of a fun way to talk up neat stuff. Also another potential huge time hole (and I've already got plenty of those!).
posted by fenriq at 9:56 AM on December 19, 2006

Doomed to be gamed by unscrupulous marketers.
posted by D.C. at 10:11 AM on December 19, 2006

I'll wait for the [short span of usefulness]

sandwiched in between the

[Too few votes to make it useful]
and
[Popular enough to be gamed by unscrupulous marketers]
posted by vacapinta at 10:24 AM on December 19, 2006

I dunno, I like the idea, but the devil is in the details.

The Digg algorithm sucks, frankly. The front page of Digg is a joke, with one of every three articles being either totally empty, totally wrong, or scam. (I just made that number up: the SNR ratio on Digg is way too low for me, which is my point).

I doubt this would be any better.
posted by teece at 10:24 AM on December 19, 2006

Itsliketotallybroken.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 10:45 AM on December 19, 2006

Whoops. Or it *was*, just now, got a db error. Getting through fine now.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 10:46 AM on December 19, 2006

RIP whatsbetter.com
posted by white light at 11:08 AM on December 19, 2006

haha, dig is so introspective. The second article on the front page is a news.com article about a digger being banned from dig.

I guess "introspective" isn't really the right word.

Digg sucks and sucked from the get go. That mostly has to do with taste of course.
posted by delmoi at 11:58 AM on December 19, 2006

Neat idea, but the "like" in the title really grates.
posted by brundlefly at 12:22 PM on December 19, 2006

teece: "The Digg algorithm sucks, frankly. The front page of Digg is a joke, with one of every three articles being either totally empty, totally wrong, or scam."

The Digg algorithm is quality engineering. The problem is that the users are, on average, total idiots. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say in the biz. The new Web 2.0 way of saying it (which I'm attempting to coin right now) is "When your social site is all morons, it's a waste of time."
posted by Plutor at 12:25 PM on December 19, 2006

The Digg algorithm would work perfectly well if they didn't have it set to churn out like a hundred stories per hour (I'm not sure I'm even exaggerating). If they cut down significantly on how much stuff makes it, I bet you'd see a huge increase in the quality.

Then again, maybe the damn-fool users (who have, by now, taken it over completely) really, really want to read "How to Porgram in PHP for begginers!! MUST READ!!"

(and you click through and get a 200-word Adsense-covered blog entry that goes "Some people think that PHP is very hard, but actually that's just a myth because it's really easy! Let me show you how to program in PHP for beginners! My beginner tutorial will show you how to program in PHP!" etc. etc. for 200 words.)
posted by reklaw at 12:36 PM on December 19, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]

I welcome the excessive quantification of everything in our otherwise meaningless lives.
posted by oxford blue at 3:55 PM on December 19, 2006

Doomed to be gamed by unscrupulous marketers.

In seconds after it gets on the radar.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:49 PM on December 19, 2006

unscrupulous marketers.

Tautastic.
posted by oxford blue at 6:18 PM on December 19, 2006 [1 favorite has favorites]