5 Reasons Pikk is More Interesting than Digg
Digg is the current king of social media, but may not be for long. There are more and more link sharing sites of increasing specialization (see Tipd for an example), and other sites are morphing into link sharing hubs (that’s what Twitter is quickly becoming). Despite all of Digg’s success, it’s an imperfect system, and can get tiresome and repetitious pretty quickly. I have never enjoyed popularity contests, and Digg strikes me as pretty close to exactly that. The popularity of a story is often a function of who submits and promotes it, not of its inherent value. Pikk attempts to addresses these issues by promoting stories solely on merit. It’s built into the 2-choice voting system. So, in the tradition of Digg baiting, here are 5 reasons why Pikk is more interesting than Digg.
5) Stories have two choices instead of one
With only a single way to vote on Digg, there are no dimensions to the aggregated vote and nothing really interesting can be extracted. If 500 people digg a story, and 250 people digg the next one, there’s not much difference between the two, and nothing really useful about the numbers 500 and 250. You can’t say that the first story is twice as good as the second, only that twice as many people bothered voting at that particular time of day, while the rest just browsed the story.
Having to ‘pikk’ a side lets you gauge your perspective against everyone else’s. Now, the numbers suddenly do mean something. It’s at times surprising, validating and even angering, but always interesting to see how your vote stacks up.
Here’s an example of a popular story on Pikk, that asks you to vote on whether a collection of Barack Obama swearing excerpts from his audio book, “Dreams for My Father,” is funny or foul.
After you vote, the results are revealed, showing you how your vote compares with everyone else’s.
4) The vote is untainted
I mean this in two ways. First, a ‘digg’ is supposed to be a vote that says “I like this.” But instead, it has devolved to mean “I am doing my Digg associate a favor and digging this in exchange for his doing the same for me in the future.” Voting has become an expenditure of currency. Pikk requires that you put some thought into your vote and take a stand. So in this sense, Digg votes are tainted because they often represent favors and not genuine interest in the story. There is a ton of interesting content that never gets to the front page on Digg because the cool kids own the playground.
Digg votes are tainted in a second sense in that you see how many diggs a story has before voting yourself. The existing vote count absolutely influences your vote. What’s the point in voting on a story on the front page? Your vote doesn’t count. On Pikk, the vote is blind. You do not know how everyone else voted until you vote. Sometimes you stand alone as the sole dissenter, sometimes you are the deciding vote on a contentious issue, and sometimes you go with the crowd. But in any case, your vote is clean, because it’s untainted by knowledge of the tally.
3) Sharing with your friends means something
Pikk has friending, and when you friend someone, you can see each others votes. It’s always a two way street, no one-way fandom. The friendship means something because there is trust involved. You can see how often your friends agree with you, so there’s a useful and fun metric by which to categorize your friends. Also, since you’re sharing your vote, you’re not going to stay friends very long with someone who is nudging you to vote on their SEO story.
2) Interestingness is built in
As much as I hate the word, your willingness to vote on a story represents a built-in level of interestingness. Why? Because your voting is an opinion, and you naturally pass over stories that are either too boring to care about or are ambiguously worded. This makes the most interesting stories naturally bubble to the top, regardless of who submitted them. With Pikk, a lot of votes means it’s an interesting story, whereas with Digg, a lot of votes just means you’re friends with MrBabyMan. Stories that are landslides or highly contentious are both interesting, and naturally attract a lot of votes. The leaderboard shows you the most disputed and landslide stories, along with other cool lists.
1) It’s always surprising
On a daily basis, particularly among your friends, it is surprising to see the vote results. Before you click to vote, you are certain that it’s going to break one way or another, and you’re pretty sure how your friends are going to vote. But it very rarely turns out that way (except for softball questions, which don’t get a lot of votes anyway). Here’s an example- there is a story called “Edna Jester, 89, arrested for keeping neighborhood kids ball,” which talks about how an old woman was handcuffed and put in a police car for keeping a kids ball that rolled into her yard. I figured, “there’s no way anyone would think this was ok,” when I voted. I was dead wrong. Some users were praising the police for equal enforcement of the law, and complained because she was given so many chances to return the ball before the arrest. I won’t tell you how the vote turned out, but I promise, it’s interesting.
So that’s my list. Give Pikk a try, and feel free to add it to your blog or web site using the Pikk widget. A wordpress plugin is also available which lets you optionally add a Pikk poll (and/or a digg badge) to any posting. Try it and send me feedback and kapauldo AT pikk.com. (Also, please digg this story to spread the word). Thanks for reading!