#12: Do You Digg?

I was a little disappointed with the articles that seemed to be most popular on these social media sites. I felt like I was reading tabloids or watching a reality TV show, neither of which I would choose to spend my time doing. I slogged through a lot of 'junk' before reading anything that might be considered valuable information. Maybe I'm just too easily distracted by the sensational (along with everyone else, it seems), but I can't imagine spending just a little time with this, and I don't really have a lot of extra time to spend with it at all....
Some reactions: Reddit appealed to me. (He's very cute). The source seemed more obvious to me, right from the headline page. That's important to me, in terms of the quality of information, and the possible bias built into the article. Digg was kind of overwhelming for me, visually. It took me a long time to even realize the source was noted on the main page there, too. Newsvine was very slow in loading and I didn't have a lot of patience for that. But it appeared it might have more informative articles. Mixx - at first glance I could find no sources listed on the main page. It seemed very tabloid-y to me. In looking at StumbleUpon, the thing that struck me most was that I could spend a lot of time there and maybe come across some cool stuff, but mostly I would just be looking around. It seemed kind of pointless to me, but maybe I just didn't spend enough time with it.

I felt like I just scratched the surface on social media sites, even after spending a lot of time on them. But I also wasn't really compelled to go much further either. My sense was that for me and in my work environment, it wouldn't be very productive. On my own time, it could be entertaining, but I'd probably choose to do something else. This is one Thing that probably won't get added to my toolbox.