Guest Post by Iva Marjanovic. Iva is a writer for TotallyMoney which is a website that helps you compare loans for bad credit and credit cards for bad credit. She also runs a popular personal finance blog where she shares money saving ideas and frugal tips.
Let me start this off by saying that I really enjoy Digg and I hope that one day, just one of my articles will make it up onto their homepage. That being said, I think there are some things about Digg that need to be addressed before the site becomes useless.
The other day while I was visiting Digg, it kind of dawned on me that I was always seeing the same user names on the homepage. I know this isn’t exactly an epiphany because I’ve heard many other people say the same thing, but I kind of either blew off the idea or just didn’t give it much thought.
If you look at Digg’s homepage over the course of three or four days, you’ll probably end up seeing between 25 and 30 users who dominate the homepage. Seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me if Digg’s “top” 25 users accounted for 70% of what ends up on the homepage – meaning that us little guys have very little chance of making it up onto the homepage, no matter how good our articles are or how funny/creative/useful our submission titles and summaries are.
This leads me to believe that Digg is more like a high school social clique than it is the user driven news submission site it claims to be.
Does this mean that Digg is useless and we shouldn’t visit or submit articles to it? Absolutely not. I still think Digg is a great way to get traffic to your sites and overall is a great resource when you’re trying to find relevant topics to write about. However, it still needs to be fixed.
To that end, I have come up with a couple of ways that us small users can take back Digg and force changes so that everyone has a fair shot of getting up onto the homepage:
- Reverse Digg. What I mean by this is vote for all of the crappy, irrelevant spam sites and not for the sites submitted by the “power users.” I think this will help in one of two ways: 1) it will force Digg to come up with a more stringent process for submission (having your site pre-approved for example) and 2) if Digg is afraid that spam sites will make it up onto the homepage, they’ll probably be more willing to cater less the “power users.”
- Don’t vote. Continue to use Digg, read the stories, etc., however don’t vote for anything. If nobody votes, nothing gets to the homepage.
- Create alliances. Try and find other disenchanted and disenfranchised Digg users and create a strategic alliance and vote only for each others’ submissions. If you can put together a group of 50 or 60 users (which I don’t think would be that difficult) you all stand a pretty good shot of making it up onto the homepage.
- Stop submitting to Digg. If you’re really pissed with not ever getting up onto the homepage, stop submitting to Digg. It seems to me that blogs and other small websites make up a pretty good majority of what’s submitted to Digg. If all of a sudden the well goes dry, Digg’s going to have to change their stance on who gets up onto the homepage. There are plenty of other sites (Shoutwire, Fark, Reddit, Netscape, etc.) what will make up for the loss in traffic.
Anyway, these are just a couple of ways I think us small guys can help to force Digg to share the wealth and not take us for granted.
On that note, don’t forget to Digg this!
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Use Profigg.com instead… is much better… you can even win prizes… great..
Nice post!
And yeh, i allways see the same off 30 digg users gatting their stories on the home page.
Sorry for taking so long to get those last 14 comments up.
Props for making it to the digg front page.
If you’re not interesting. You’re not interesting. Find something else to digg.
@Gareth
>So the question is, do I Digg this story, or do I bury it? Hehe.
I think the biggest problem with digg is the bury feature. You shouldn’t bury every article that you don’t digg. You shouldn’t bury things that don’t agree with your politics. But, the same 25 people that this article talks about not only gets to choose what makes it to the front page, but they also get to remove stuff they don’t like. Post that get 1000+ diggs are not lame and they are not spam, and they shouldn’t be removed from the front page on the advice of one or two users. If that happened, digg would be much more diverse. Right now the only stuff that makes it is stories about pot, *nix, video games, and digg. Now, that’s lame.
digg was always going to fail. it seems that the wisdom of crowds is that crappy stories get promoted.
http://www.cheapgreencar.com
My biggest beef with this system is that the SAME stuff submitted by people withing the Clique AFTER Myself an other lesser known Users Ends up with Diggs in the Thousands while ours remains in the two digit numbers. The worst part is when we linked directly to the source when the other morons link to some BLOG that links to the source and they STILL get Diggs that lead to the front or Second Page and ours remain in oblivion. And to make the worst insult, I posted a video ON google Video about Wii Drum Demo and Put it up on Digg and it went nowhere. Then one of the TOP users linked to MY video later on through some BLOG and it ended up with thousands of diggs. Bullshit.
Thanks for Writing this
I want to add: So what if you make the front page of Digg.com? The traffic is worthless, if you look at my stats, I had a few stories hit the front page in January, my traffic went absolutely berzerk, but my revenue didn’t change and afterwards it settled back to the exact same levels it was pre-digg. If that’s the case, which I have heard from several people, what’s the point? Just to say you did it? I stopped submitting stuff a month or two ago, I still read Digg almost daily and love the site, but it’s pointless to worry about your story hitting the front page or not. It is what it is, a social site and there are always going to be people who are submitting like crazy and gaming the system to an extent. I just quit worrying about it.
Almost 3000 (and most likely soon 3000+) diggs later and I think you may be moving yourself into that elite group of “power users”.
Us little people have our eye on you.
This page was the most popular of a 24-hour span of time. But this page was “hidden away” on Page Two (at Digg)within the first several hours.
This page, of course, is buried today — even though 24 hours haven’t elapsed.
What, if anything, does that tell you about the “fairness” at Digg?
Are 30 “power users” allergic to light?
Do 30 “power users” have something to hide?
Or we could all Bury linux topics for inaccuracy!!
Woot Woot all aboard the bury train!!!
WebMasterGuy – thanks for pointing me out because that actually REALLY pisses me off. Looks like I’ve got another topic to write about.
Great post, Brian! Digg is awesome, but I do see a few problems also. I, for one, vote in order to keep track of these great websites that are posted. But what I do from time to time, is keep up the “upcoming stires” tab for a while. Yeh, thgere are some dupes there, but there is also some interesting stories also. Maybe there are two kinds of digg users – 1. those who want to submit stories and want to get noticed, and 2. those who READ the stories and vote (and save the links). Is it not as important to get your posting voted on as it is to still have a awesome conglomeration of websites and stoires to amaze us all?
I’m curuous to see how digg will evolve. They really have somehtijng here, even though it has its flaws.
M
Follow the money, Brian.
Power users work round the clock. What do they do for a living, do you guess?
Take a look at websites getting millions of hits each year from Digg.
Some of those sites are good at self-promotion, I dare say. Maybe they hire some power users to slip them a bone or two? Or maybe those sites ARE power users. Who knows?
Maybe some of the power users are businesses, not people? Maybe some of the power users don’t exist in flesh and blood?
Digg is broken beyond repair simply because what I suggest actually can be done.
Then it’s settled – for those of you who want to start our own little digg clique, send me an email via the contact form at the top of the page and we’ll work something out.
While I’m very active elsewhere, I’m quiet on Digg because (a) I don’t run Linux and (b) I’m a moderately conservative guy who goes to church. That puts me in the viscerally despised category on Digg and the people are just plain mean on any topic–technology, games, politics, whatever. For that reason, Digg will never grow above 1-2% of the internet audience where it stands now.
I’m not a noob, either: I’ve been online professionally longer than anyone you’ll ever find: just try and beat 1977. I’ve also managed online community for a couple of the largest internet companies on the planet. You don’t grow a mainstream online audience by insulting huge percentages of it.
Well, it looks like this post has run out of steam. Thanks to everyone who dugg it, posted comments, emailed me, etc.
Why not find a way to let advertiser sponser content on digg? Check it out http://www.seobrien.com/2007/04/digg-this-solution-to-black-market-of.html
interesting how this problem doesn’t seem to haunt delicious
This is the same thing I saw on slashdot, a very few members controlled the front page until it was boring to read their narrow view of the tech world.
I don’t think its like a high-school clique at all. Maybe for a few of them. But I think at least 1 out of ever 10 stories on the homepage is put up there by armies of digg bots.
Thats why I prefer delicious than digg.
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