Social Swarm News Response

     Digg wasn’t designed to respond to fast-action news like this. Yes, I’m talking about the Manhattan plane crash. Digg’s comment voting system was too clumsy to keep up. Voting critical news updates up through ranks of prankish jokes didn’t make sense given the gravity of the news underway. This time the “social” approach felt a bit slow.
     With the crash now at 1088 diggs, the top comment is, “***** you. This is no time to inject conspiracy theorys.” So much for crowd wisdom.
     Google News had nothing on its front page when I first checked it nearly an hour after the crash. Why did I check Digg first? Had this not been an accident, I figured Digg would be neutral enough to grab all the relevant links. As it turned out, Digg users didn’t have much to offer besides the Gothamist link, which had all the updates that answered the questions we wanted answered.

Update: It appears that you can now sort Digg comments by date/time.