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it's an excellent point on digg's challenges diversifying. the sexism was a huge barrier to attracting and keeping more diverse participation. i'm not sure i saw digg's failure is a general indictment of democracy, though :-)

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I didn't mind the sexism, but did mind the leftism. Another person might not mind the sexism or the leftism but might be turned off by the geekiness. Digg merely managed to box itself into a small demographic (young male leftist atheist geeks), such that anyone who wasn't in that demographic would take a quick look, get turned off, and go elsewhere.

It's not a general indictment of democracy, but it does prove that there can never be such a thing as a general-interest social news site. The future is nichey.

I thought Digg had it's fair share of right-of-center and Libertarian content, especially in the last couple of years. It was considerably more often that I'd find a conservative article on the front page of Digg than I would on Reddit's /r/politics.

Perhaps. I haven't really checked it much in the last few years. And that's the other problem -- if somebody goes there once and looks around and doesn't find anything they like on the front page then they're probably not going to come back.

Just a non-scientific observation, but my impression was that Reddit had more libertarians than Digg.

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