Andrew Benton

Why Newsvine is Better Than Digg

Dec 9 at 2:02pm by Andrew Benton

It’s no surprise that I found myself wanting to write an article about this, I am a member of both Digg and Newsvine, contribute to each, and like them both equally for their individual strengths. Both of them run on the basis of user-generated content; digg through article/picture/video submissions, and Newsvine as a place for new-age journalist to write to a niche of other writers and daily news and opinion readers. While each of them are pretty different, both in audience, age range, maturity and content strength, to me at least, Newsvine is the more superior of the two.

I want to first say that by superiority I do not mean sheer numbers, if that was the case then Digg most assuredly wins. What I’m talking about is relevant, educational information that me as both a contributor and a writer, can read and ascertain to make myself a more educated individual. Below are a few areas that Newsvine is great in. I will talk later about what Newsvine could do to improve their readership though.

Usable Knowledge
If you look at the front pages of Digg and Newsvine respectively, as of the time I’m writing this article, this is what I see:

Digg Top 5 Stories:

1. This the new image section?
2. [ESSAY] 2 Girls 1 Cup
3. EIDOS CAUGHT LYING ABOUT KANE & LYNCH SCORES
4. BREAKING NEWS: U.S. Report Says Iran Halted Nuclear Weapons Program in ‘03
5. Awesome Broken Water Balloon Photo

Newsvine’s 5 Most Active Stories:

1. The Wii is MORE Expensive This Year Than Last
2. First Ever ‘Viner Fetish Survey
3. Hugo Chavez tastes defeat in referendum
4. A LISAED Poll: “Oh Fred, Fred. Wherefore Art Thou Fred Thompson?”
5. Looks like ID protection is up to us

As you can see from the comparison of the two, Digg pretty much only has one, maybe two real articles that could make you any smarter. With Newsvine, all 5 are interesting, researched, well-written articles by the community, for the pure reason of educating fellow Viners.

Maturity of Community
With the comment system in place with Digg, the vast majority of it’s users do not welcome any comments that contradict a particular story. For example, if a user were to post a breaking story related to Bush, they almost always mis-title it inaccurately to get a view across, for a perfect example, see here. An article that is clearly from a site with slanted views, titled in such a way to not even be news, but rather a partisan attack with a misleading title.

On to Newsvine. While I do believe some of the same “tin-foilers” from digg (from all sides of the aisles) show up on Newsvine, the system is much better at handling these kind of people. For one, you can flag a comment so that if it is truly of no value, inflammatory, etc, it can be removed. The main difference that I’ve noticed however is that the community of Newsvine likes to use the comments section as more of an open forum, rather than a pedestal to either condemn or promote the story. Most Digg articles seem to be quick rips at whatever party, then one side subsequently votes the view down. That brings me to another thing that I really dislike with Digg. If you post something contrary to a articles overview, you almost assuredly get voted down so no one will ever see your comment unless they go looking for it. For example if someone posted a positive article about Ron Paul, and someone brought up a point about Ron Paul that was not positive, the “fan boys” of Ron Paul would most assuredly bury that comment. It’s almost a communistic information controlling by the masses. Newsvine does not allow this to happen, it actually has the community behind it that loves to debate, argue, disagree and discuss. I have never seen people on Newsvine flag someones comments unjustifiably, but it happens 24/7 on Digg. The bottom line with maturity is that Newsvine has lots, Digg has hardly any.

The only noticeable difference I’ve seen about Digg in relationship to Newsvine, is that if you’re looking to drive traffic to a site, or become popular, Digg is the way to go, if you are just worried about content, Newsvine is the way to go.

So, what do you guys think? Am I way off?