Yesterday Yahoo! launched a new service, Yahoo Suggestion Board, which placed user generated suggestions for Yahoo’s various services/ portals into a “Digg Like” voting site. The Digg mafia on the other hand went mental, defacing the new Yahoo service with immature messages such as Digg rules, Digg clone, don’t copy Digg and other stuff rubbish. In light of the vitriol expressed by users of Digg that Yahoo somehow copied or stole the voting premise, in a similar way the very same people carried on when Netscape was relaunched, let’s consider the notion that Digg is an original idea itself.
It isn’t.
Did Kevin Rose invent voting? Did Kevin Rose invent the concept of democracy, even if we all know that Digg at best is a festering, rotten and corrupt democracy reminiscent of Soviet Russia (remember, everyone voted in the USSR, it was the choice of leaders that was limited).
No, Kevin Rose didn’t.
According to Wikipedia, democracy is agreed to have had its roots from Aristotle, with Ancient Greece having the first recorded democracy of any shape or form.
According to Digg users, is Kevin Rose Aristotle? I wonder how many digg’s that concept would receive?.
Of course the history of democracy and voting has evolved much since ancient Greece. Our modern democracy (both in the US, UK and Australia) has its roots in the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which followed the Glorious Revolution. The founding fathers of the United States stole the idea of bicameral rule when establishing Indepedence in 1788, and other countries have followed the leads of both the United Kingdom and the United States, often in a combination of both systems (Australia’s Washminister system of Government).
Maybe Kevin Rose was secretly behind all of this?
Switching to the online world, voting and online polls have been common on the web since roughly 1994-95, indeed I can remember using 3rd party polling on a website I owned in 95. Did Kevin Rose create all of this?
Digg is a variation on the democratic theme, as is Netscape, as it Yahoo Suggestions, Reddit or any other of the similar sites out there. Digg does not and will never hold an exclusive right nor license to voting online. If this is indeed what Digg users are suggesting, lets all rally against Digg for stealing the idea from Aristotle, the leaders of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the founding fathers of the United States, to name but a few :-)
Tags: Digg, Yahoo Suggestions
Originally posted on February 15, 2007 @ 6:07 pm
>> Digg does not and will never hold an exclusive right nor license to voting online
I completely agree with this, but I also understand why some diggers were upset. Yahoo did copy the functionality, and it is a digg clone
I understand that Duncan is a Whig.
I hope he’s not offended if I count myself among those who consider the ‘Revolution’ more a coup d’état than a real revolution of the masses.
The ‘Revolution’ gave England its Bill of Rights and ended the Stuart’s overreaching monarchism.
However, I do find it strange that even the pope helped finance a Protestant gay Dutchman, William III of Orange. ;-)
most of diggs users are under 16 so they probably think digg invented the internet….
I don’t condone spamming and graffiti… but I think the majority of the complaint was that it LOOKED identical, and the blog post by yahoo did explicitly mention that it was digg-like. I think you missed the boat by focusing on the voting.
Koonat,
it doesn’t look anything like digg, it’s not an open fourm to suggest stories, Yahoo Suggestions is an inhouse voting tool for literally that: suggestions for Yahoo services. Totally different in it’s intent.
Since when did the American revolution take place in 1788?
That’s so funny, i was there when yahoo suggestions got flamed :)
The little shovel is nothing but a glorified link farm. If you put good info on dig, they steal your link and pointit at their store, sporadically throughout the day, i have screenshot proof btw.That is illegal. It’s called “false advertising”. That’s ok though, the’re just giving me awesome info for my book. :)