Are we a Digg clone?
A couple of sites have tossed this idea around while reviewing us and we figured from the start it was going to happen - the always cool CNET blog WebWare and Killer Startups - as well as some submissions across the tubes on other social sites. We don’t think we are. Digg was definitely a part of the inspiration that led to Sift’d, but we have created a very unique interpretation of the social news, user-powered concept.
To call Sift’d a clone gives us too little credit and Digg far too much. The real inspiration came from Digg’s users, of which we are a part. We’ve all seen the site gradually transform into something new, and some of us aren’t fond of the direction it’s moving in.
There is room for improvement on many features on Digg (and of course on our site) but above all we don’t think they’re providing for all the different demographics that make up their community. Various categories and groups dominate the site and the only recourse users have - confirmed during their Townhall meeting the other night - is to turn off entire categories?
The single most defining difference between Digg and Sift’d is we’re in it for the end users. We wanted to create an environment where the lolcat, Obama, Ron Paul, Apple fans and every other flavour of fanboy can coexist without sacrificing anyone else’s experience because they’re part of a smaller demographic. We’re also committed to being and remaining very open about how the site works, and the data we’re collecting, Above all, we’re committed to working with our community to develop the site in the directions the users want.
To achieve that, we’ve created a collaboration section which will be a permanent and constant two-way communication channel between our users and our developers. We will also be launching a live development version of the site to sit in parallel, and provide users a chance to explore, test and criticize as we develop and enhance new features. An API allowing unfettered access to almost our entire database is in the works, and will be launching some time in the not too distant future.
Sift’d is packing a considerable arsenal of features that are all designed to enrich your experience on the site. Digg users will recognize some of them - we’ve been begging for them for a long time. You can get a good overview of our features here. To cater to a diverse audience we made a bunch of decisions that ended up being pretty cool and implemented some unique behind the scenes logic and programming to make everything much better for our users.
Users can create filters that allow them to block websites, other users, keywords in the title / description / both, categories and media types. They can also create advanced filters that use any combination of those criteria.
We also designed the site from the ground up so that each section has it’s own independent front page. Popular stories move from the upcoming queue to the front page of each section, and from the front page of each section to the home page. The sections don’t compete with each other. In other words, a flood of political news doesn’t mean every other section gets less fresh content.
We also have prevented consecutive categories from being made popular. That leaves room for popular categories to play a larger role in their section, but not to overwhelm it. Between the filters and the independent sections we think we can produce an experience that satisfies a large group of people. As trends appear and new sections become necessary we’ll add them too.
We want to give our users direct access to our developers. We think it is important that the users have the ability to bypass our marketing and operations people. Although those people are very important to us, they usually are the stumbling blocks in most companies that slow down the process of giving users exactly what they want.
