Despite my quasi-critical article about Digg and how it needs to lose the “high school clique” feel, I think I made it pretty clear that I still really enjoy Digg and think that it’s a fun and useful site.  Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for another high profile user driven news site.

Specifically, I’m talking about Netscape.  To be perfectly honest, I think that site is a piece of crap and is even more action packed full of issues than Digg.

There are two distinct issues that I have with Netscape:

1. Users spam the hell out of each other in an attempt to get their submissions voted up to the homepage.  I recently logged in to my Netscape account to submit an article from one of my sites and I noticed that I had 58 new messages in my Netscape inbox.  I was kind of surprised at the number of messages so I decided to check it out.  I didn’t really have 58 new “messages,” rather I had 58 pieces of spam from people sending me links so that I would vote for their stories.
2. These spammers are arbitrarily dealt with.  I told a buddy of mine about this and unfortunately, he must have thought spamming Netscape users was a good way to get traffic to his site.  Later that evening he went and sent a bunch of Netscape users a link to vote for one of his posts.  Low and behold, within the hour his account had been suspended and his site was no longer able to be submitted to Netscape.  After hearing this I went ahead and checked out who had been spamming me, and it turns out it was only a couple of users, but they had spammed me over the course of a week.  Amazingly, one of them was listed as one of Netscape’s top users.  Apparently spamming is okay for some users and not for others.

This is where I think Digg has actually done the right thing - they make it near impossible for users to directly contact/spam each other.  I know a lot of people would like Digg to create some sort of internal message system, but I think if they do they’re making a terrible mistake.

Anyway, I’m done with my user driven news site tirades.  Now that it’s all out of my system, I’ll get back to writing about regular old business stuff… until something else that irritates me comes along.