Digg’s Signal-to-Noise Ratio Just Too Upside-down For Me

Don’t get me wrong: I like Digg, and Graceful Flavor has had stories on Digg’s front page, mainly on account of many of my stories being Apple/OSX-centric. Digg is an entertaining site, which is different from, say, a truly newsworthy site. I tend to prefer real news sites as I scour my Google Reader for new Graceful Flavor content.

It comes down to one thing — signal:noise ratio, which is more loosely translated into ease of valuable information discovery. Boorrring, I know, but bear with me.

Digg has become a bit too noisy for me, so much so that I sit in front of Google Reader, click over to my Digg feed, and always get astounded at how many times I have to hit “J” to move through all unread items (yes I know you can scroll too, but that’s not the point) that just aren’t interesting to me as a blogger. And that’s for a relatively small timeframe. Digg can be a firehose, and most of the water isn’t as clean as I’d like.

In one sense, Digg has become a sort of an inverse Darwinian popularity contest: certain themes (Apple/OSX, Linux, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, Gears of War, etc.) garner massive diggs almost immediately, even if their content is light, whereas others don’t, even if they’re truly more newsworthy or substantial than the popular themes. As a result, many popular, topical items make the front page, whereas others (many with excellent credibility) die in the river of the un-dugg. In the purity of information sense, sometimes the weak live and the strong die on Digg.

Digg is neat for when I want to blog about the occasional nuance or tech oddity, but it takes too much work to actually get to real, substantial news.

Maybe it’s how I work. Maybe it’s because I’m a blogger. Because Digg is an excellent site for general browsing. Maybe that’s the rub. But for someone who consumes the content of dozens of sites a day, Digg’s flood of items — many of which are of questionable substance — well, it just gets a bit tedious.

Am I in the minority in feeling this way? I know that Robert Scoble echoed similar sentiments a while back, but his post was before I began GF in earnest, so I lacked the blogger context of what he was talking about. Now I know, and now I agree.

What about you? Are you a serious blogger who finds Digg to be a valuable feed day after day? Or are you like me, finding Techmeme and Tailrank much better in terms of signal:noise?

FYI: I haven’t yet unsubscribed my Digg feed, but I’m considering it. I’d like to hear what other bloggers think.