social bookmarking can suck.
I'm sure there are MANY people like me who read/visit more than one social bookmarking website on a regular basis. And for the purpose of this rant, I'm including reddit/digg style social news sites too, cause I believe it's a form of social bookmarking.
Have you ever browsed more than one site only to come across the same news item?
Every single day I think I must be wasting a few minutes to skim and ignore a lot of the stuff I see in my rss reader because of this. For example, I subscribe to the feeds of slashdot, boingboing, programming.reddit, dzone, wired news, and on top of that I regularly look at delicious popular links as well as the front pages of digg and reddit but I don't care for the feeds (signal:noise sucks). And out of all those sites, there is occasionally a subject that the readers of most of those pages end up caring about (e.g. the RIAA losing bigtime, politics). So, what happens? The same story gets rehashed and reposted on said sites multiple times (well, except the more "moderated" ones like boingboing) over a period of several days. That's actually not so bad, I guess I can deal with it.
Let's focus on a more specific subset of some of those sites. /., programming.reddit and dzone all have one thing in common: geekery. The latter two are fairly technical/development minded bookmark-related, while slashdot is more of a general geek news type of thing. So, what happens on these sites? The same things get posted on all three of them all the time. Thankfully slashdot has editors and isn't a complete freeforall like the latter two.
Looking at the other two sites that are almost exactly like each other (except one is a bit nicer)...It's bad enough that the same exact blog posts and software ends up on both of them usually within a day of each other, but on top of that what happens is that some smartass decides to post the same thing with a different name which you sometimes don't realize until after you've clicked the link. And if THAT wasn't bad enough, people repost individual stories from websites that you'd assume anyone frequenting a site like proggit already knows of and subscribe to (if they give a shit). Sites like xkcd, the daily wtf, coding horror, ALA, 37signals, LtU, and lastly anything from /. and ars. LtU isn't that commonly linked, but I swear, the first five will not stop spamming my rss reader (oh man, especially the first two), and because people are being such douchebags submitting said links, there's no easy way to filter them either. So on top of being linked more than once on those two sites either by a total cretin of a submitter directly linking to said item or to another site talking about said item, I get to see it first on the actual site it was on.
For the love of all that is holy. PLEASE. STOP. SUBMITTING. LINKS. FROM. THOSE. WEBSITES. And I'm not talking about just proggit, but pretty much any social WHATEVER site unless it's for your own bookmarking purposes. There are probably some more sites that I can't remember off the top of my head, too. So, lemme repeat. STOP SUBMITTING THOSE LINKS. Thanks.
edit: Right now I'm seeing that story about Apple "crippling" other browsers by using undocumented APIs in Safari for something like the 20th time. Not only have I seen the original page multiple times, but by now I've also read some commentary about it too. Grarggghhhh.
Have you ever browsed more than one site only to come across the same news item?
Every single day I think I must be wasting a few minutes to skim and ignore a lot of the stuff I see in my rss reader because of this. For example, I subscribe to the feeds of slashdot, boingboing, programming.reddit, dzone, wired news, and on top of that I regularly look at delicious popular links as well as the front pages of digg and reddit but I don't care for the feeds (signal:noise sucks). And out of all those sites, there is occasionally a subject that the readers of most of those pages end up caring about (e.g. the RIAA losing bigtime, politics). So, what happens? The same story gets rehashed and reposted on said sites multiple times (well, except the more "moderated" ones like boingboing) over a period of several days. That's actually not so bad, I guess I can deal with it.
Let's focus on a more specific subset of some of those sites. /., programming.reddit and dzone all have one thing in common: geekery. The latter two are fairly technical/development minded bookmark-related, while slashdot is more of a general geek news type of thing. So, what happens on these sites? The same things get posted on all three of them all the time. Thankfully slashdot has editors and isn't a complete freeforall like the latter two.
Looking at the other two sites that are almost exactly like each other (except one is a bit nicer)...It's bad enough that the same exact blog posts and software ends up on both of them usually within a day of each other, but on top of that what happens is that some smartass decides to post the same thing with a different name which you sometimes don't realize until after you've clicked the link. And if THAT wasn't bad enough, people repost individual stories from websites that you'd assume anyone frequenting a site like proggit already knows of and subscribe to (if they give a shit). Sites like xkcd, the daily wtf, coding horror, ALA, 37signals, LtU, and lastly anything from /. and ars. LtU isn't that commonly linked, but I swear, the first five will not stop spamming my rss reader (oh man, especially the first two), and because people are being such douchebags submitting said links, there's no easy way to filter them either. So on top of being linked more than once on those two sites either by a total cretin of a submitter directly linking to said item or to another site talking about said item, I get to see it first on the actual site it was on.
For the love of all that is holy. PLEASE. STOP. SUBMITTING. LINKS. FROM. THOSE. WEBSITES. And I'm not talking about just proggit, but pretty much any social WHATEVER site unless it's for your own bookmarking purposes. There are probably some more sites that I can't remember off the top of my head, too. So, lemme repeat. STOP SUBMITTING THOSE LINKS. Thanks.
edit: Right now I'm seeing that story about Apple "crippling" other browsers by using undocumented APIs in Safari for something like the 20th time. Not only have I seen the original page multiple times, but by now I've also read some commentary about it too. Grarggghhhh.