Today I am introducing a new article series I will be writing called “Baseless Opinion” where I will talk about things that I honestly have no real business talking about but will still talk about anyway, after all that is how the internet works.

For this article I will be talking about everyone’s favorite social news mash-up Digg.com. Recently there were rumors of Digg potentially being acquired by everyone’s favorite internet search monster, Google.com. Kevin Rose, founder and chief architect of Digg, outright denied the rumors as being anywhere close to truth, but that didn’t stop the internet from being the internet and going on and on about the acquisition regardless.  Continue reading via the link below.

Now that the history is out of the way, on to my baseless opinion. Internet based companies tend to acquire other internet based companies for one reason, the users of that company. Same can be said for other non-Internet based companies, such as Verizon acquiring Alltel. However, when it comes to the internet it is more about “who” the acquisition gives you rather than “what”.

A number of years ago, Yahoo Inc acquired Flickr. Did Yahoo really NEED Flickr; not really? After all, in this day and age where computer and web programmers are as abundant as sweat dripping off of the hairy flesh of my… chin, Yahoo could have just as easily and for far less money paid a group of programmers to just overhaul the Yahoo Photo service into something that could compete. What Yahoo would not have gained going that route was the already large Flickr user-base.

Another example is Google’s acquisition of YouTube. Google already had it’s own video sharing service, but they still bought up YouTube. Was the technology behind YouTube amazing? Not really, it was a video sharing site. Any two-bit fly-by-night porn site has a video sharing service now (most of which, oddly enough, have the word TUBE in the title). Again, in this example, what Google gained was the YouTube’s user-base.

So what, if anything, would Google get out of Digg that they don’t already have? They have GoogleReader, which is a great “personal” news aggregation service. I say personal because the individual user has full and complete control of where they get their news. Digg, on the other hand, is more of a social aggregate of news, with new articles being posted by the users themselves.

Would Google buy Digg because of their back-end technology? My baseless opinion is no, since Google could throw money at a brick wall and turn it into the second coming of Yahoo Serious. Is it the people working there? Again, no, as I have already said that computer and web programmers are a dime a dozen, or more realistically “a dime a deluge”. So what does that leave for Google? The user-base, and there lies the problem.

No company in their right mind would ever want the Digg.com user-base, unless of course the company is 4chan, but even 4chan has more viability to be acquired by a porn company than Digg has being acquired by a large scale tech company.  What sets Digg’s user-base apart from sites like YouTube or Flickr is in the Comments section.  The whole point of Digg is the “social” aspect, people having a voice and the ability to hear other voices as well as block out those voices that you don’t wish to hear.  The problem arises when the comments become to largest aspect of the website.

I know many people that don’t use Digg anymore simply because of the immaturity of the comments.  Beyond that, many comments appear to be pretending to be mature but still show that they are not anywhere close to being that.  It is true that you can comment on photos on Flickr or videos on YouTube, however, the major difference is that the comments are kept so far down on the page from the main content and are not promoted to the degree that the average user would notice while browsing.  Flickr and YouTube have the idea that “content is king”, and I will add “comments are fluff”.

In contrast, Digg’s design is almost the opposite.  We have the news title and 1 paragraph describing the news article in question.  The “content” takes up about 600px by 100px, just slightly larger than the average internet banner ad.  Below the “content” is about 3 football field-lengths worth of comments flip-flopping between every single extreme end of the spectrum that it makes the partisan nature of the average Fox News and CNN viewer seem like a kindergarten slap fight.

Why on Earth would Google, or for that matter, ANY company want to bring in a user-base that is so greatly against anything corporate?  You only have to look at the latest story about Digg.com protecting their trademarks against a website known as digpix.com.  Digpix, for those unaware, had a website that almost looked identical to Digg.com circa-2004~2005.  I say had because it appears that the website owner, rather than simply complying with Digg’s request and make the subtile changes to make the website not look like a carbon copy clone of Digg, desided to be the big man on campus and shut down the site.

And now the Digg user-base has flipped on Digg itself, blasting both the company and it’s co-founder, Kevin Rose, about how they have a double standard when it comes to trademarks.  You see, a year or so ago the crack for HD-DVD was posted on Digg and it was removed.  The “Digg Army” went into high gear spamming the website with the usual RIAA/MPAA hate speech, but this time rolling up Digg into the hate speech as well, saying that it was unjust for a site based on social media to get censored like that.  To make matters worse, the user-base called out Kevin Rose on this as well since he used to do a hacking podcast called “The Broken”.  In responce to this, Kevin and the rest of the Digg team reposted the information about the crack, and in my baseless opinion, solidified the win for BluRay as the next generation HD disc format since, at that time, BluRay had yet to be cracked.

The problem is that the aspect of Digg that harms it’s resale viability is in the very community that they built, and the ideal around what they built it from, that being “social”.  Social is fun when you have a few people getting together, talking around the proverbial water-cooler.  When the number of people around the cooler grows to such a number that would make an infinate number of monkeys run away leaving their infiniate number of typewriters behind them, things begin to break down.  Things break down even further when each and every one of those people, myself included, think that their voice really and truly matters in the great sceme of things.

Trust me when I say, no one gives two flying fig-newtons ™ about your opinion, just like you don’t care about my opinion (but if you have read this far I salute you).  Now, you may be asking: “If no one gives a care about their opinions, then why would Google care about them if they bought Digg?”  That’s simple really.  Digg started out small, and as such had a small, relativly sane community.  As Digg grew so did the user-base.  However, rather than the sanity level growing at the same pace, it dropped like a lead balloon submerged in a pool full of pure fail.

What was one of the major points being made by a good number of the Digg community during the rumors of a Google acquisition?  “All users of Digg who post stories should get a cut of the sale money.”  What a bunch of “I do nothing but copy-paste, please give me money” jerk-offs.

Now don’t get me wrong (which if you are a Digg user you most assuredly WILL), I don’t hate Digg itself, nor do I hate Kevin Rose.  I love Digg for the things that I get out of it.  I filter out political stories because if I want crummy spin-doctored political non-sence I will just turn on any of the cable news networks or listen to political talk radio.  I use Digg for seeing interenting news that I WON’T find at those other places.

Also, for any of you that want to blow my baseless arguments out of the water by saying that I also comment on Digg and am therefore no different from the comments that I am talking about, guess what, that is fully, 110% accurate for you to say.  I comment there because I do have a voice there and can put forth my opinion, which is what makes Digg great for the community, just not for a billion+ dollar tech company.