Social News is social.
Broadcast News is asocial.
Propaganda is anti-social.
From recent discussions it seems that people don't quite understand the difference. They seem to want Digg to be a broadcast news site, but it isn't. It is social news, meaning it has a community that serves the needs of that community.
Jason Calacanis discusses this today, he discusses Digg's community as its "vertical". But I think it's even more fine grained than that.
Jason says:
... we all know digg is a very specific vertical: young, tech males (YTMs). This is an amazing demographic to capture in large part because they've left TV. This means advertisers looking to reach young males are totally lost--they need digg, Engadget, videos games, and podcasts to reach these folks. TV ain't gonna do it.
I can see that, but there's a lot of me in that vertical (increasingly not the young part, but still...). I don't watch TV, I am a tech male, and so forth.
But I've never found Digg useful, I never fit in with the community, and while I get tons of hits from other social news sites, I've received very few from Digg.
Why is this if my posts are popular elsewhere and they deal with the vertical? Theoretically, my popularity in other tech writing circles should transfer to Digg. But it does not - simply because I don't - for whatever reason - resonate with the Digg subculture.
It's because Social News is social, it serves the a specific subculture that somehow naturally evolves around the following:
- The technology
- The specific UI
- The seed participants
- The sales material for the site itself
- The seed articles that make it into the system
So we see two threads there ... The First is the look and feel and The Second is the personality of the culture that is forming.
These combine to fit with specific personalities or needs of people looking to join the community:
- Is that culture accepting or dismissive?
- Is that culture masculine or feminine?
- Is that culture fond of humor or deadly serious?
- Does that culture feel American or Chinese or Japanese or Brazilian or French?
- What sort of cross-user interaction does the UI and technology facilitate?
Jason notes his notable success at Netscape and how they saw a dominant culture taking over their top news stories. They made a conscious decision to foster more variety on the home page.
When I was working on Netscape we realized this early on when the political folks took over the homepage and ruined the experience for anyone who didn't care about politics. We decided to level the playing field and make the homepage have no more than 2-3 stories from each category. It worked like a charm and Netscape is the "general news portal with some funny stuff." We did this early and that's why it worked. digg is not going to be able to break the stranglehold the YTM have on the site--they will always be the #1 social news site for tech/YTM.
Exactly. Netscape's decision to do this early in the maturation let it become part of the sites culture. They tailored the UI, the technology, the initial stories and their site's literature to reflect this.
That made it part of the bedrock upon which the Netscape community sprouted. This is true for all social circles. Not just on the web. It's true for your local rotary club, your local church, and your neighborhood. It's also true for things like MySpace - a community made entirely by the people who joined and only slightly by the technology employed.
Social News sites should never expect to, nor should they wish to, take over the domain previously inhabited by the NBC Nightly News. From this point onward, if there is ever an overwhelmingly visited "one stop shop" for news - it will be due to censorship and authoritarian control.
Social news is a social activity. Global dominance has no place here.
Blogged at my house in Seattle with Live Writer
Another vastly informative post. I don't know if your recent posts are deliberately aiming for a broader audience, but this blog now has much more of a "putting it in perspective" feel. Fabulous.
Posted by: Karen Anderson | 06 January 2007 at 20:28
Awww! (blush)
Posted by: Jim Benson | 06 January 2007 at 22:05