Interesting Conversation with Rob Malda

Ok this is not a post about any web tips or advice, it's about an interesting conversation I had with Rob Malda at the Linuxworld Conference in Boston. In case you don't know, Malda is the founder of the tech news site slashdot.org . The conference itself was rather boring, despite the early excitement when a server caught on fire at the unisys display, (That's a good way to show your server's capabilities) so after walking in circles for an hour I decided to check out the slashdot lounge. It consisted of zonk, Malda and some other slashdot writers sitting on couches and playing risk or updating the slashdot site while people from the conference watched. It was almost interesting for awhile except not too much was going on, and there were no booth babes to speak of (go figure) so I decided to move on, but not before approaching Malda and asking him if he used digg.com. At first he kind of looked at me like"You've gotta be kidding me" but he went on to say that he occassionally checks it out but he prefers sites that are more controlled (edited) then digg. He also went on to say that both digg and slashdot aren't really original sites as they just report on news from other sources. He said "Everyone seems to think that we have some kind of rivalry with digg, when the truth is ..we don't give a shit. I prefer our site because of the content control, which prevents stories like "Here's a picture of my armpit!" from reaching the main page. I also don't have time to read 30 or 40 stories a day, so I think they have too much content right now. It's too wide open." Frankly I couldn't agree with Malda more, digg used to be such a great resource for all that is tech and it's main page seemed to be consistently full of interesting and useful stories. These days it does seem to be clogged with random "armpit" stories that somehow make it to the main page. It only appears it will get worse too as they plan on opening up more categories for story submission, most of which have no relevance to technology, but are more akin to stories that you'd see on shoutcast or newsvine. I hope that doesn't happen too soon.