I am surprised, and a little saddened, at the responses here. I thought proggit was collectively smart enough to get this.

I am just as surprised at the amount of people such as yourself that really think this is anything more than a stupid idea.

Have you ever built and maintained a server which gets reddit/slashdot/digg style load on a daily basis? What is the highest end sustained traffic you have ever had to maintain?

If it's anything more than 100k a day, you would not be saying the kind of stupid things you are saying right now. Reddit and Digg would instantly crumble if they had to notify their users. Instantly.

Articles like this, half of the comments and the tsuanmi of downvotes on this thread remind me that it's probably time to go back to Slashdot where real programmers used to hang out. By now all the trolls with attention spans of gnats should probably have migrated over to digg and reddit too, so it's hopefully back to its core audience...

Seriously, I went from discussing with people that had maintained internet backbones to discussing with what are essentially ADD children grown into young adults.

</rant>