Diggers, please, give it a rest. I know you’re probably in a bad mood already, what with the grim outlook for your favorite Hobbit on Lost — but you’re all making yourself look silly with your protests this morning over Yahoo’s alleged “rip-off” of Digg. As Michael Arrington pointed out:
…the purpose of the site has nothing to do with finding and promoting news stories. Rather, they’re using the Digg-voting mechanism to power the Yahoo Suggestion Board where users can submit their comments to Yahoo on various products.
This episode makes me virtually certain of something I’ve suspected for some time — the average Digg user must really be that 13-year old, allowance-drawing dependent, still slurping from his parent’s bank account, as I’ve heard some people (most recently the WSJ) suggest.
There’s no doubt Yahoo took obvious visual inspiration directly from Digg — but they did it for a site with a totally different purpose. They didn’t make a site that looked like Digg that was about submitting and voting on news — they used a Digg-style interface for a suggestions site, to help enrich their community (that’s only about oh, 100x or more larger than your Digger posse). This is beyond OK, it’s what the web was built on. Why do you think everyone’s search form/results looks the same? As interfaces get popularized, as Digg has, it’s inevitable that best practices will emerge based on those popular UIs — from search to eCommerce to video (do YouTubers freak out when other sites include copy-paste embed forms?) to blog & newsreading, it’s been happening forever. Reacting like this demonstrates a level of ignorance that only serves to undermine any value that Kevin Rose’s much-loved linkdump might have for advertisers.
I refuse to believe that people who have a day’s experience in the web/tech world (you know, working for $$$ and not just designing their own blog/Myspace page) wouldn’t (a) know that if ALL you’re talking about is some similarities between UI, which people have been emulating — ask Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, etc. — for years, then nobody got “ripped off”, (b) recognize the differences between this new Y! offering and Digg — seeing as Yahoo is using a similar interface for a very different purpose, and (c) be flattered/stoked that their beloved Digg was providing such obvious influence over one of the oldest web companies out there.
As these vigilantes from Digg set about trashing another community, it makes me wonder how Diggers would react if a bunch of octogenarians descended on their site, and started loading it up with spammy comments and posts about how Digg stole the concept of voting from them.
Write it down — this episode may very well be your “official” shark jump moment, the day Digg proved itself to be little more than a lesser-educated, less-professional Slashdot with a glossier interface. And maybe that’s important in today’s world. But seeing as it’s entirely ad-supported at the moment (without a ton of ads running, I might add), I’m not totally clear on who cares to sell to the Digg mob, and I don’t see rush-to-judgment overreactions like this doing much to change that.