We came across Yahoo’s announcement yesterday for their “Digg-like” site for voting on suggestions. It really didn’t seem to be anything exciting to write about, so we didn’t. Then this morning, we came across the submission for this announcement over at Digg, and as I’m writing this, there are nearly 2,988 Diggs. The title? “Yahoo Shamelessly Rips Off Digg and Brags About it,” followed by comments like:
- “Typical corporate America: Little guy has great idea and puts it into production, big guy steals idea and says I did this then gets a raise.
- “A replica of Digg yet it still doesn’t catch my eye and make me want to come back.
- “Somebody needs to get fired for this.”
And to extend their loyalty to Digg, they also left about 200 comments, including many obscenities under the Yahoo Blog announcement with comments like:
- I hope this is a sick joke. How dare you rip off Digg. I mean, you could have at least make it look a little different! Just sad….so sad.
- Wow, complete rip off of the Digg interface guys. Way to go! Pathetic.
- Stealing Digg’s idea isn’t something to brag about.
- WOW great job ripping off Digg. I will never again go near Yahoo.
Of course, not all Diggers are as pathetic and immature as the ones that ganged up over at the Yahoo Blog. In fact, many Diggers were telling the immature ones to cut it out, because they were giving Digg a bad name. Who wants visitors from people who are going to do that kind of thing to a site? Afterall, Yahoo even gave credit to Digg, and a link back. Even if it does look somewhat like Digg, there are huge, major differences.
Yahoo’s site is merely a site for suggestions with a voting process. Voting is by no means new. People have been voting since forever. The thumbs up, thumbs down? Okay, sure that may have come from Digg, but that’s the best way I know of for signaling yes or no.
Digg is a news site. Had Yahoo intended their version for news, sure, you could have screamed copy-cat! But, a suggestion site? They’re asking for suggestions regarding some of their sites likes Autos, Pipes, Real Estate, etc., and as for page views, they’ll get maybe a few thousand per day.
So once again, part of the Digg Community shown through, tainting the name of Digg over what should have been a compliment. The other Diggers are left telling fellow members of their community to shut-up and sit -down while burying their heads in embarrassment. And since when did citing your source become bragging?
You Can delete the forum post i did on this as posted it just before you did or same time. Sorry
I think this quote pretty much sums up the [en.wikipedia.org] of diggers on this topic:
The mob mentality that digg can sometimes display always astounds me. I mean honestly, what is all the fuss about, so what if they took and used Digg’s model and used it for their suggestion board. Props to them for using it as a means to listen to suggestions of their users, and making it social on top of it. There is no logical reason that I can find for anyone to freak out about this.
It is natural for businesses to borrow concepts and ideas of competitors or others in their industry…and build off of that concept, and further innovate it. Look at any industry and you’ll find this to be true. Companies are always taking successful ideas from their competitors (usually so long as they aren’t violating copyright), so that they not only don’t fall behind the popular trend, but also so that they can make further innovations in the industry. I mean if no company were to take/borrow a concept from another in their industry….you’d find that innovation would be stifled, and progression of the industry would virtually come to a halt. It’s completely natural for any business to borrow successful ideas, if they didn’t, they would be completely ignoring what their users/customers (and others in their market/industry) find cool and interesting….and for them to fall behind on a popular idea or trend is to fall out of the competition.
They gave Digg their due credit for the success of the model that their implementing, and it’s not like Yahoo! from what I can tell is using this in any way to compete directly with Digg.
I’m all for people using the Digg model/concept for other purposes, as it shows their ability to keep current with popular models. I’ve never personally been happy with sites that directly try to take digg’s model and compete with them as Netscape has done, particularly because I think that’s nothing more than stealing an idea and trying to be nothing more than number one…because you are part of a bigger corporation that has the money to throw at such projects. Furthermore, I despise Netscape to this day for taking the model and then throwing money at frequent submitters at Digg in order to steal both the users contributions and the users following and bring it over to Netscape for what I see as a clear purpose to triumph over Digg. Also I still think that paying people who link to content isn’t justified in my opinion, as they aren’t content creators and do nothing more than link to popular content (though I do know they have other responsibilities for their position at Netscape)…(ad revenue sharing with youtube users works for google because they are paying content creators and creating a model for the common man to distribute content that is just as popular as that produced by companies like Viacom)…I think it’s a tribute to Netscape’s inability to understand the Digg model. I’d have no problem with someone taking the Digg model and trying to compete with them, so long as they are truly trying to build upon the concept and drive innovation in the industry, and aren’t just looking to jump on the bandwagon.
A lot of the comments diggers have been making are completely off base, and are both irrational and ignorant. All the the hateful arguments I’ve read by diggers are completely invalid and unjustified. People really need to read into things like this more and think about it, rather than just joining in on the mob mentality.
lol @ Digg Fanatics
@curtissthompson: I was really disappointed at Digg when I saw this happen as well. Honestly, when I first saw Yahoo launch this I thought “meh” because it was just a suggestion site for goodness sakes. Now what if Digg created a suggestion section for their site? Would everyone at Yahoo go and complain that Digg copied off of them for creating a suggestion section? Absolutely not.
Not only that, but it always makes me mad when people get angry because Microsoft “copies” from Apple or visa versa. If “copying” never went on then would anything ever get better? I doubt it because when someone copies an idea it forces the other company to step up their game to go beyond. You were right on the money Curtiss!