I guess social bookmarking is just beyond me

I was browsing Reddit the other day, which lately I like more than Digg, when I came across this link: How I earned My Way to the Top of Reddit. I want to quote the guy who posted this:

At first i just trolled the site, and after 2 weeeks of that I signed up and started voting and posting. I tell you the early days were tough and easy, one you could make front page with a few votes, but at the same time if you got 25 karma points for an article you had a number 1 article. Anyway slowly i realized what type of articles people voted on and started finding those at the same time i would post up stuff I liked. At that time my RSS Reader became a nearly full time job i have about 80 feeds i check for new stories so i can beat people to posting. So I slowly found myself taking the lead on the daily and weekly leader i figured the next challenge was the all time stats. I will tell you it was a big hurdle passing kn0thing and spez on that chart and fear they would strike me down and i would have to start over. But over time and mostly recently I was gaining points on many articles and my stuff was nearly always on the front page. I remember in the early days I once had 15-20 of the front page articles from my persitance of posting. Anyway until recently I felt unchallenged and that made me lazy until Kam showed up and wanted my top position and now he keeps me busy on my toes to find the best stuff before he does.

— ousama

I have to say that reading this was a big eye-opener for me. I mean, i had heard about this sort of thing before, but I never realized it was so serious. I always figured that sites like Digg and Reddit were all about, you know, a place where you can promote your own material. I mean, if I’m Mr. Z-list blogger who-knows-he-could-be Mr. A-list blogger if-he-had-some-exposure, then these link-voting sites sound like they are made for me. Hey, let’s face it: that Mr. Z-list blogger was me, before the first time I got dugg. Digg was a great stepping stone for me to “reach the masses” in a way that no other resource could provide.

Unfortunately, the current community at sites like Digg and Reddit are anything but blogger-friendly. I’ve been watching the comments posted by many of the users at these sites, and they all agree that just about any link posted from a blog is “blog spam.” They hate blog spam and have even said that blogs are a complete waste of time. This isn’t about my lack of success with Digg as of late, though; what I’m interested in discussing here is the attitude among the many users who drive sites like Reddit.

Listening to ousama here, I can get a pretty good picture of what Reddit users like. ousama says he tracks 80 different feeds and finds articles that he knows will be popular with users and submits them. This makes him a top member of Reddit.

So what?

My intent is not to focus on ousama here… I’m only using him as an example. With that in mind, can anyone explain to me why you would want to do what he is doing? Let’s look at what’s going on here:

• ousama tracks 80 feeds that he says typically provide valuable content that will rise to the top of Reddit… as long as he can post it first. Lemme guess… these feeds would be news sites? Tech sites? Business sites? Big, popular sites with lots of money? Can we assume that every one of these feeds comes from a site that is already very popular and doesn’t actually need the Digg/Reddit exposure? I mean, let’s say [big-news-site] dot com has 100 articles a day, and a few articles a week are “Digg-worthy.” If [big-news-site] dot com gets as many users in a week as Digg gets every day, there’s a pretty good chance that everyone knows where [big-news-site] is. Users can find these “Digg-worthy” articles without having to rely on sites like Digg or Reddit. Chances are that [big-news-site] was in their feedreader by default. I mean, I see the value of making sure that every mention of Apple and Linux in the New York Times should be bookmarked so that the entire tech community sees it, but it seems at least a little redundant.
• ousama is a big part of all the popular content that keeps people coming back to Reddit. What does ousama get for this? Absolutely nothing. I know ousama has all this worthless “fame” and “karma” for contributing to the “greater good,” but he’s making Reddit a profitable venture and he’s not seeing any of that profit. I mean, for something which he says was basically a “full time job” at one point, I think it’s worth mentioning that there are a lot of “full time jobs” out there that earn you a lot more than Reddit-posting.
• people like ousama treat Reddit like some kind of competition. I always thought Reddit was supposed to be a place for promoting stuff that you find in your daily Internet travels… the whole practice of searching out valuable content seems a little overdone. I’m grateful for guys like ousama who put all their hard work into finding great articles, but considering that he’s only regurgitating the stuff he finds in his 80 or so popular feeds, his hard work isn’t actually necessary. Some Reddit user is bound to come across these articles eventually anyway; if ousama wasn’t there trying to outrun them and post first. The fine news will reach the Reddit community the way it was intended… from an average user just promoting what he/she likes.

Unfortunately, users like ousama and their way of thinking is dominating sites like Reddit and Digg right now. I’m not sure why, but maybe these users migrated from Slashdot, which has always worked this way. I think bloggers, in the end, feel a little disenchanted. If blogs and social-bookmarking sites have always been a part of web 2.0, I think bloggers from the beginning looked at sites like Reddit and Digg as an answer to an age-old blogging problem… that of the long tail and the A-list. I think bloggers saw social-bookmarking sites at their inception as a place where they could promote their work and get noticed. Over time, however, the young Slashdot-esque competitive crowd has turned these sites into a competition to see who can find the best content that comes from anywhere but blogs, and to even downvote or avoid blogs altogether. So we effectively have a few Slashdot clones that differ only in their interfaces and nothing for blogs altogether. Nice.

Fortunately for me, I’ve found enough avenues to promote my work in the past few months that I don’t need things like Reddit or Digg anymore, but that’s only because I write about web design topics. For bloggers in just about any other category, Digg and Reddit aren’t really an option anymore. I think this is kind of a shame, because we are back to square one when it comes to blogs promotion. I’m not about to suggest that sites like Reddit or Digg will ever change though… they’ve become very predictable and packed with content that isn’t so hard to find at all. I would, however, like to see a new bookmarking site intended for blogs… kind of like what Technorati is to search. I have some ideas on what would need to be done to make it work well, and if I had the time (read: if I weren’t a college student) I would probably try to implement myself. Maybe I should drop out…

… just kidding