5 Reasons Why I Want Digg for Girls
heartlessdoll.com
heartlessdoll.com
What exactly IS "girl stuff"? The article didn't mention a single example of what a "girl link" is, except jokingly mentioning a few sexist ideas.
For me, Hacker News is a great example of this. Why do we need Hacker News when we've already got Proggit (i.e. the Programming sub-Reddit)? Truthfully, Reddit's social news technology is more advanced than HN, and there's a lot more people and stories there. Right?
As you'll probably agree...no, not exactly. What sets HN apart (for now) is that it's smaller, more serious, and arguably more intelligent than Reddit's. I see the same links posted here as I do on Reddit; the key difference is the conversations that ensue and in particular the tone of those discussions.
This is long-winded way of saying "girl stuff" isn't about having gossip and fashion articles, but more about a culture evolving around those stories. I do think that the male-dominated culture surrounding sites like Digg, Reddit, and even HN can be off-putting to women.
The author is really saying two things:
- "I'm not interested in the articles that make the front page of Digg": a terrific reason not to use Digg.
- "If women had a Digg of their own, the articles on it would be much more relevant to me." Probably somewhat true. But I know plenty of female geeks who wouldn't give a shit about anything on weheartgossip or kirtsy.
The real goal here is to find a quality community that appeals to you. Unfortunately, this is not all that easy: not only are most people morons, you need a lot of people to be active in the same place for a social website to be worth visiting.
I actually set up a slinkset site, http://www.bababase.com, a few months ago based on the very premise we're discussing, but I've had a tough time finding a way to get traction amongst a non-nerd crowd! (Moms, in this case.)
iVillage is filled with moms, as are wahm message boards, etc., etc. Your audience is there, and they want what you've got, I'm sure.
I'm really not the world's most phenomenal marketer or community organizer. It takes a lot of those two competencies to be successful in a social application endeavor. :/
Instead, I'm stuck reading headlines like "Compressed Air Cars Coming To New Zealand" and "New maskless lithography trick may keep Moore's Law on track."
What is it about certain internet places that make people so awful? Anonymity? Or are there people actually that bad all around me, in real life, and I simply don't notice?
I think this is why HN tends to be more civil and worthwhile -- you have active editors, and most people use their real names as their usernames or in their bios.
ps - her crack about compressed air cars must have really hurt...
Not going to let it keep me down, though. We just sent out a bunch of letters to investors. Low and behold, we now have a pitch.
You know the phrase 'six degrees of separation?' I feel like it must be at least three or four. I have little to no contact with these people, even though they're all around me. I felt similarly when I went to a baseball game, once. Wow.
Even though I have never been to a sports game (excepting a Harlem Globetrotters show, but that wasn't really a game), I kind of feel the same way walking around my hometown of Fairbanks. The population is small enough that I likely have no more than two or three degrees between myself and any random stranger. It's a very odd feeling, and one that I've never gotten used to.
Some of the reasons that I find Slashdot a bit better are the labeled moderation system and the karma system. They help keep some of the worst trolling off the site at the cost of encouraging a sort of groupthink.
edit: My proposed mechanism for this is that the pattern matching in women's brains is less strict than the pattern matching in men's brains (i.e. women see patterns more easily), which for women blurs the line between interesting and insightful. But I don't actually have any credible evidence to support this, so take it for what it's worth.
In older times, boards had moderators, and admins picked out active members as mods based on their performance.
But this model is susceptible to group-think, especially when a topic falls outside the contract. It just happened here during the presidential election that apparently the body of users are sufficiently politically diverse, that intelligent, respectful debate prevailed over mindless up-voting of anything adhering to one specific mindset. It could very well have went in the other direction. It's absolutely no guarantee that you because someone make insightful tech/startup comments, that he also is going to vote down a stupid comment, even if it's in favor of his political POV.
Solving this problem; making sure that a community like HN can stay intelligent, and not be diluted as it gains popularity, I think, is a very big opportunity.
Even when I haven't been involved in running an online community, I've always been a participant in several of them. And yes, some women need to feel "safe" before they will come out of lurkerMode. (Obviously I am not in that set, but I expect the woman who wrote the blog post to which I linked does count herself among them.) For instance, I'm a member of two women-in-IT tech groups (a general one and one specifically for web designers/developers, and believe me, you can't shut them up). The whole notion of women-in-IT and its reflection in online communities isn't going to go away just because some guys (and some women, too) say, "But really, you don't need a separate space."
(As you can probably tell, this is a topic very close to my heart.)
There's the 'OMG' reddit alien, replete with blond hair and lipstick: http://thumbs.reddit.com/t5_2qh3n_29.png?v=4v4n810ku3an8yqud...
Sadly, it falls into the category of 'what advertisers/editors think women want in a social networking site.' Based on my own at-work experience with somewhat/fairly geeky girls (not coders), tmz.com and perezhilton.com already accomplish what lipstick/weheartgossip seek to do.
Seriously though, there are several such sites with different target groups:
PrettySocial (ours): for young women, focus is on fashion, beauty, health etc. with lots of pretty pictures!
Kirtsy: for mothers and older women, coverage is more general
Boudica: it's a new site, the stories are a little random, but looks promising
The problem here is that a small core group of users is able to exert undue influence on the site. If the ranking system on Digg were better balanced, its featured stories would better represent the interests of its broader (and presumably more gender-balanced) user base.
Oregon Woman Loses $400,000 to Nigerian E-Mail Scam First Look at Johnny Depp- Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland New honeycomb tire is 'bulletproof' If TV Shows Had Truthful Titles Phil Gramm Has No Remorse Over Destroying the US Economy Chinese pirates crack Blu-ray DRM, sell pirated HD discs Top 10 Unfortunate Political One-Liners 30 Rare & Expensive Gamecube Games New MythTV Interface Preview Mark Cuban charged with insider trading.
Anyone see a male bias there? The Johnny Depp article would actually tip the scales to the female side in my opinion.
- "Oregon Woman Loses 400k to scam" -- Although it's a story about a woman, I suspect that the vast majority of the 552 current comments are from men, making rude, arrogant, or demeaning comments. Men braying like jackasses and cracking puerile jokes about how dumb someone (a woman) is? What's not to love?
- "First Look at Johnny Depp" -- Skews female
- "New honeycomb tire is 'bulletproof'" -- A story about car/bike technology and guns/bullets. Not to feed any stereotypes here, fellas, but that positively reeks of testosterone.
- "If TV Shows Had Truthful Titles" -- Sophomoric snark on the Internet can amuse both sexes, but tends to skew male. Perhaps because sophomoric snark in general skews male. No offense intended.
- "Top 10 Unfortunate Political One-Liners" -- Obsessing over political minutiae/sophomoric snark again, combined with a bit of political trivia? See above. Or do you think that the relentless Ron Paul stories were also being constantly up-voted by an enraptured female audience glued to whatever new tidbit was coming from his camp?
- "Phil Gramm Has No Remorse Over Destroying the US Economy" -- See above. This is a story that could be appealing to both men and women, but the puerile slant to it makes it slightly less interesting to women, or so I've tended to notice. Just like in Real Life, your hilarious political jokes just AREN'T THAT FUNNY to most girls, y'know?
- "Chinese pirates crack Blu-ray DRM, sell pirated HD discs" -- DRM nerd porn. There's no reason why this wouldn't appeal to women, but by and large, the tone and thrust of the article greatly narrows its (male) audience.
- "30 Rare & Expensive Gamecube Games" -- Skews both older and to a more rarefied hardcore/distinguishing gamer audience. Which is largely male. If it said 'best Wii games' for instance, it wouldn't be so male-centric.
- "New MythTV Interface Preview" -- Nerd porn. See above.
- "Mark Cuban charged with insider trading." -- Nerd-slash-financial-slash-sports porn.
Cue the inevitable comments how you're a woman and those stories totally appeal to you. :-)
Most women I know are far more into snarky commentary/comedy than I am, and are very interested in politics, the economy, and way more into tv than I am, etc...
So something like this could be largely automated, start off with a collection of links then categorise them according to the text on the page and/or the writing of the person linking to them.
It doesn't work well enough for what you're proposing though. The accuracy (according to their blog) is roughly 50%, which is no better than chance.
boudica.com
Boudica has four main categories to keep it simple. News, for any breaking news stories relating to women. The Arts, covering theatre, cinema, books, art shows, etc. House, anything to do with interior design, architecture, gardening and so on. Finally, Time Off for anything that you enjoy when you're not working, a great restaurant, a wonderful hotel or destination.
Why can't it just be a place for women to discuss whatever they want to? I know that there are potential problems with women being a minority online, but if the topics are categorized in this way to encourage women and discourage men from posting, I think that's limiting.
Digg and reddit are male-oriented because most of the posters are male. Is there some way of achieving a female orientation without making the sign-up process onerous? (Or by having an easy signup but making the site stereotypically targeted.)
Jennifer Lopez wants another baby The other side of Angelina Jolie
Granted those were 'cherry picked' to make my point, but this Girl-Digg site seems like the same stuff you'd see inside the popular glossy and rather crappy women's magazines that are sold in supermarkets and bookstores nationwide. All that's missing are the "10 Signs Your Husband is Cheating" and "47 Ways to Lose Weight Fast" articles.