If Digg were a real community, I wouldn't want to live there.

A man walks into the general store of a small town, and greets the shopkeeper...

Man: "Hello Fred. How you doin' today?"
Shopkeeper: "It's DO-ING, with a G on the end. And you asked me that last week. Lame! Thumbs down."

There has been a lot of talk around all of the new "social" sites out there. These sites are driven by the participation of their users and are experiencing their share of hype lately.

But this post is going to focus on Digg. Now, I love Digg. Digg is built on a great concept, allowing users to submit content then having the 'community' vote (or digg) to push certain pieces to the front page. Granted your average Digg user is a bit more tech-oriented than myself, so while I may not have much of an interest in the latest release of GNOME, I do stop by the site a few times a day.

When talking about Digg, there is heavy use of the words social and community. And that's where we get to the headline of this post. The Digg community operates fairly well together, in that they produce interesting and valuable results. But underneath that cooperation is an undercurrent of insults, rudeness, and general negativity. Sadly, you need to go no further than the comments section of almost ANY post to see this.

For example, today someone submitted pictures from the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, which contained some early photos of what one can expect at the upcoming conference (they were really just some photos of a banner that had been set up). Now, if you believe in the very concept of Digg, this was of interest to a lot of people, since it got 721 Diggs and made it to the homepage. (I use an Apple example here, but this isn't about Apple users, or Linux people, or Microsoft fans. You can find these types of comment in almost any Digg post.)

But looking at the comments, the haters seize upon the post right away, and the whole comment section just descends into pointless arguments.

The very first comment is:

"And we care becuase....?"

At which point people jump on the commenter for spelling "because" incorrectly. Many Digg users love nothing more than to point out spelling mistakes, for no apparent reason, like those annoying people who interrupt and correct other peoples' language when someone is trying to tell a story.

Another helpful commenter asks:

"If you can't be bothered to capitalize correctly (sentences and proper names) then WTF should we digg this?"

Again, why get caught up on the spelling? And this comment brings up another attitude you see often. The question is posed from a you/we viewpoint. As if this one commenter is part of some "we" that the submitter needs the approval of. Doesn't this go against the whole idea of Digg? There is no you and we, only us. The submitter is just as much a part of the community as the commenter (definitely a more productive part). And of course, this just leads to a bunch of other submitters pointing out the incorrect use of WTF.

I'm sorry, what were we talking about? Photos of something? I got distracted...

This type of behavior is definitely not just a Digg phenomenon and, honestly, has been going on since long before there was a true Internet. But with all the talk of social and community, it would be nice to see Digg be more, well, social, more like a true community.

Right now, Digg is a mean and nasty place. It's like a small town full of people who hate each other. Why not let it be a more productive and positive place, especially considering Digg users probably have more in common with each other than users on most other social sites.

The next time you're on Digg, and you have the urge to write a pointless, mean-spirited comment, resist the urge, both for your own online karma, and for the good of the community...