The Chronicles of Gene

"Boo Hoo I'm Digg Fan Boy" cries the virgin.

Now don't get me wrong I think Digg is a great site because I visit it myself daily and watch diggnation religiously, even though I should be concentrating on work. Digg has revolutionized how aggritate style sites operate. No longer is it a few uber geeks siting around reviewing posts before going to the home page, *cough* slashdot *cough*. Slashdot had it's day in the sun, hell it was way more then a day they ruled the tech news sites with an iron fist, slashdot was the place to be, the slashdot effect was notorious for making sites crumble to their knees in shame.

Then Digg came along and stole their thunder with this idea of letting the members of the site vote on stories and let those votes determine which ones make it to the home page. Like WOW (not WoW, if you get this or know the acronym ..... I'm sorry ;) ) you just gave the people the power and they ran with it. No longer does a site feel the pain of the slashdot effect but now the get dugg in to a big hole and buried until the site admins can convince their hosting company to bring them back to life.

The people have made Digg a reality and a force to be reckoned with. Pick any story on Digg and you will see a thriving community. A loyal community. A passionate community. A fan boy community, which could only be rivaled by the Apple fan boy community. I can already hear it now there will be fan boys going "I love Apple and Digg both! Kevin loves apples too! We are one and the same! How dare you ... blah blah blah Digg blah blah blah".

I had almost forgotten what a bunch of whiny cry baby fan boys, and girls, could be. Anytime anyone tries to mimic Digg the fan boys FREAK THE FUCK OUT!@#@!#. If you ever met one I dare you to bring up Netscape, holy christ they'd shit all over themselves just trying to get out how pissed off they are at Netscape. I think what these zealots forget is copying something someone has done, extremely well, is the most sincere form of flattery.

Take for example this story about Yahoo Autos using a Digg style voting system, check it out, they couldn't help but point out they were knocking off Digg's theme and voting system. Hell the Yahoo blog admits to it. If I was Kevin Rose I'd be laughing my ass off and sitting back and watching all the other sites scramble because someone came up with something inventive which doesn't link back to the 90's.

Fan boys on the other hand damn near freak out at the audacity of these other sites. For example this is the first comment on the Yahoo story "That's f00ked up. I can't believe that.". Honestly though at least once a week they are fumbling all over themselves to bash another site trying to use Digg's style of voting on content. Seriously fan boys, pull up your skirts and get on with life because, dare I say this, there will be something bigger and better then Digg but for the mean time why not go back to what you do best and bashing each other about how many cats you really have or some other crazy shit and leave the copy cats alone, they already feel bad enough for being so far behind.

And for the people in the community taking a stand against the crazy ass fan boys I salute you.