A Man's World

Mon Oct 02 09:44:00 +0200 2006
daBlog » Tech

I’ve been spending a lot of time on digg and reddit lately, two sites where people can share interesting links/articles with one another and vote for what they like and don’t like. The most popular links, of course, appear on the front page so that any “digger” can find the ‘best’ links more easily.

There’s also a community aspect to these sites as well. Both sites allow users to comment on links, and create a friends list. digg, in fact goes one step further by allowing users to vote on each other’s comments, as well as give them access to what links other users have voted on.

Aside from the wealth of intriguing information and media on the internet, I’ve noticed a couple of things about these two sites and their readership:

  1. The community is mostly male. Both sites are havens for geeks all over the world who happen to have, more often than not, a Y chromosome. Hence this derivative site http://nsfw.reddit.com/ (“Not Safe for Work”) which has basically become a porn portal but without the annoying popups.
  2. Comments usually fall somewhere between the rude and the really rude category. Wisecracks, snappy remarks, insults – irreverence left and right. Perhaps this is not so surprising as most of us who read digg and reddit have either absorbed too much Buffy-type dialogue, or, though we do mostly see ourselves as liberals, secretly wish we could be as linguistically ‘gifted’ as Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter.

So, when this article appears on digg, All Women Team Takes Yahoo Hack Day Top Prize, we get the worst of both characteristics. Typical samples:

See, us females can be l33t too! :D

Aren’t you supposed to be in the kitchen?
Iron my Shirt Bitch!

I’d hack the one on the left…

What, you want to exploit a local vulnerability and inject shell code into her?

Is there going to be a swim suit calender coming out?

I personally think the idea that these girls came up with (a handbag which takes pictures and automatically blogs them) is a bit of a silly idea. I don’t like handbags. I don’t like serial photography or serial blogging. But I do applaud these girls. As my cousin once said, of the 4 weeks in the month, 2 of those suck: one week we’re depressed, tired, and irritable from PMS, and in the other we’re too annoyed and bothered by the logistics of handling our monthly cycles. So the fact that these women could jump over these technical hurdles, and still elicit illicit comments from the male population, is a pretty amazing accomplishment.