Mostly I think these kinds of sites are pretty silly. First of all, there are so many sites that do the same thing. It seems pointless to use Mixx which gets votes in the low double digits, as opposed to Digg which gets thousands of “diggs”. It seems like if people are trying to find out what is most popular, then they would pick the most popular media site to do so. Besides that, the various sites featured many of the same stories so it all seemed very redundant to me to look at more than a couple of the social media sites. With so many opportunities to waste my time, this would not be my time waster of choice. I would much rather read a regular news source and continue on with my day.
With that being said, I will admit there are some features that are appealing. I think perhaps the most attractive feature is that it pulls stories from multiple sources so that you can see the most popular, without having to scour through multiple sites. I don’t think this is as useful for headline stories that are mostly going to be the same in the various sources, but it does seem to be useful for finding the more obscure and kooky news. I like the opportunity for finding random information that you might not otherwise find.
With so many sites available, I took a fairly superficial approach to evaluating them. Reddit looks ugly, so I wouldn’t use it. Mixx looks boring and unpopular, so I wouldn’t bother with it. StumbleUpon looks like it’s trying to hard to be the cool kid with it’s black background color and hard on the eyes font colors. No thank you. Newsvine is attractive and simple; I like that it looks like an actual news source, but the font is a bit small for my liking. Digg is simple and easy to read. I looks like it’s the cool kid in school without trying to be flashy and show off. The number of “diggs” various articles receive seem to prove that it is the social media site of choice for a greater number of users. If I were to start using a social media site, I suppose I woud choose Digg.
