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!
You know, youre absolutely right about the high school clique attitude of digg and I couldnt have said it better myself….
LOVE THE SITE
Mark
Hi,
Good post. Wanting to get on the frontpage of Digg… That’s a familiar feeling.
Digg definitely has its strengths and weaknesses. Because of its democratic structure, Digg is really good at finding “cool” unique stories that you wouldn’t come across otherwise. Unfortunately, this strength is in danger if it’s is as cliqueish as you say — and it sounds like you’re right.
The main drawback of Digg is that many sections (for example, “music”) are very stagnant, and don’t reflect the big stories of the day/week. I don’t know if this is due to cliqueishness or because the general Digg crowd is way more into tech-related stories than anything else.
In any case, good post – I’ll “digg” it and hope for the best.
Pete
Do you think any of the ‘top 25’ will dare to digg this? :°p Jeez, they sound like the ‘Final 5’ cylons …
The greatest danger I see about digg is simply the term ‘digg it!’ becoming so mainstream that the Sheep of humanity start giving the higher-ups on Digg more standing than they deserve, at which point the points Brian makes better get fixed, otherwise even Perez Hilton’ll starting ‘digging’ around, and that’s a scary thought indeed…
That last paragraph is a little gift to you grammar obsessives.
Damn straight. So called ‘top user’ is dominating the digg frontpage.
Have you read buy your way up to the frontpage?
It’s made the front page, congratulations 🙂
Well, you made it on the home page!
I agree with your entire article, except for all the fixes. Really, we can not help but just let those users do what they do, not a chance a blogger (like your self or myself) would be able to change one of the biggest social networks.
On the lighter side of things, I have done one of your suggestions: simply just stop submitting. I got flamed and ripped a new butt hole for simply submitting my site on Digg. I never once have submitted again, until a recent news submission; still did not make home page.
Props to article though.
Mark – Thanks for the comment and for the kind words.
Pete – Thanks for the comment and for the digg. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath that this will get up onto the homepage, but we’ll see.
I agree about the stagnant sections, and I wish that Digg would get rid of many of these sections and add things that were more relevant (for example, an automotive section).
Izzatz – thanks for the comment. I’ve heard about people buying votes in order to get up on Digg’s homepage, but I can’t say that the option has ever crossed my mind.
That being said, I certainly have thought about contacting some of the top Diggers and asking them if they would be willing to submit my content for a portion of the Google Adsense revenue. I’m sure one of them would bite.
So the question is, do I Digg this story, or do I bury it? Hehe.
I’m a top digg user. I guess I’ve been continually lucky in getting stories to the homepage. I’ve never had communications with other top diggers about getting stuff to the homepage. All I really did to get to the top was submit quality stories meaning stuff thats not blogspam or just lame in general. I then try for a catchy title and a good description with as much info s possible stuffed in it. I added people who I found shared the same interests as me and they befriended me and dugg my stories because we share a lot of interests. I guess it’s just finding people who you agree with, submitting quality content, and a little luck.
I don’t think any of your recommendations will work or help make digg a better place at all
First, digging a ton of spam and crap won’t help digg at all. If anything they will give more power to the top users because they are generally more responsible and don’t digg crap and spam. At times when digg has taken power from top diggers (there was one time when it took a top digger 150+ diggs to get to the homepage) the homepage turns to crap.
Second, I don’t think not voting will change anything, but good luck convincing every single digger to quit digging.
Third, yes, let’s do exactly what the top users have been accused of doing for years. Let’s get into little groups and only digg our stories and no one else’s. Digg can detect these small groups and takes influence from them. Just look at the littlegreenfootballs diggers. All they do is digg LGF stories and they never make the homepage. Even if no one burried all of their spam it would still take them around one hundred diggs to make it to the homepage.
Fourth, not submitting will not help your cause so I don’t see what it will achieve.
The main reasons I see for people not making the homepage is they submit crappy content or they write boring titles/descriptions. OK enough typing, I’m getting some BBQ ribs.
A Digg automotive section would be very helpful/interesting.
But as far as AdSense revenue from Digg traffic, I wouldn’t bet on it — traffic from Digg tends to have an incredibly low click-rate. The main benefit of frontpage Digg traffic appears to be branding, from the tens of thousands of impressions that result.
Pete
I understand your concern about good stuff getting left in the dust. I’ve had stories that I loved and wanted dearly to make the homepage only manage a handful of diggs where something I thought was just kinda cool gets 2000 diggs. I really think it’s just luck that determines if these small sites make it or not. I know it’s not fair but to pull out an old cliché “life’s not fair.”
Ironic you made the DIGG front page with this article 🙂
I feel your pain though. We have submitted to DIGG on and off the past several months with no success. Once we submitted a great, well though-out concise article about beating comment spam. It only achieved 5 diggs and disappeared quickly.
Oddly enough a few days later another article appeared this time on DIGG’s homepage. It was a 4 paragraph, piss week article on comment spam prevention. It had no insight or detailed explanations, and was the sort of thing you would ship up in a few minutes if you wanted to present a summary.
It was then we completely lost faith in DIGG.
Ben Carr says “I do think a lot of the stuff that DOESNT get up onto the homepage are spam sites, crappy content, etc.” I would agree except we constantly see crap like “OMG! You have to see this flash game!” or “Steve Jobs blah blah blah” or just the other day, “How To Escape Professional Handcuffs”.
I honestly believe quality content has nothing to do with what makes DIGG’s homepage. It comes down to what geeks like, be it technical, hero worship or juvenile – nothing more.
I would suggest to “friend” all the people that have “befriended” you as well.
Thanks for the great post and discussion about the fairness and ethics at DIGG — seems like they’d be open to hearing your ideas as they appear to want democratic system.
the issue about tech intrigues me — as the guys who know the tech have more at their fingertips to get the advantages online — but we need to find better ways to bridge the gaps so that other content – likel this fine blog – can help the balance.
Your on the digg homepage 🙂
Congrats and welcome to the front page 🙂
Congrats, You finally did it, your on the homepage of DIGG!!
Digg is full of shit anyways.
—–
http://www.mostofmymac.com
Ammusing article if anything. 🙂
Thanks everyone for submitting comments. This is seriously awesome and completely unexpected. Now I guess the hard part is going to be getting up on Digg’s page a second time!
Wow, I really didn’t know my offer to “digg” the post would make all that much difference…
😉
………………
In any case, good post – Ill digg it and hope for the best.
Pete
I think yours was the one that put it over the top and onto the homepage!
I hate to rain on the parade here but I feel I must make a couple of points.
First off, I’m not in the top digg clique…heck the one story I did submit only got three diggs. While I still think it’s an awesome picture apparently no one else (save the two people who dugg it) did.
While the high school clique analogy may be appropriate given your view I have a completely different strategy for attacking this digg “problem” as you have described.
So let’s start from the top. How does one get on digg’s front page? The answer invariably is getting someone’s attention to an interesting article, picture, or game. There isn’t much more on the site that can’t be categorized into one of those three categories. So once you’ve submitted your awesome amazing prize winning URL or have someone else do it, what can you do to improve the chances of getting it to the front page? The answer is nothing. That now depends upon the masses.
One of the major topics of digg and Kevin Rose’s speeches recently has been the inclusion of the ability to see what one’s friends are digging more efficiently. This stands to make significantly worse the issue of the friend clicking and the massive friend load that some of the top submitters have. This is the root problem. These top submitters have had so many people befriend them simply for submitting cool articles time and again. And to be absolutely honest I can’t exactly fault them, but I haven’t yet done it. It’s these people who aren’t the submitters but are friends of them and digg up their submitted stories mindlessly that in my mind is creating the phenomena that you’ve described.
The solution I present is to simply make the homepage much more in the spirit of Cloud View that digg currently has in the Upcoming Stories section and kill the front page as we currently know it. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have it’s place in digg, it surely does just not as the primary view of the homepage. I’m proposing that with the new front page contain less information about the stories at hand. No statements as to who submitted the story but only the size of the text in question to give you some indication of how popular a story is. This also will force more concise titles as a result which isn’t always a bad thing.
Now will this resolve the friend situation and the mindless diggs that top submitters will get? The answer is invariably no, it won’t. That would only come through the abolishment of friends which will never happen for a number of reasons, nor would I want this feature to go by the wayside. What the change in view will do is (as stated in Chris Anderson’s _The Long Tail_) is force people down into the more niche-like content. Finding much more relevant content that they specifically like and not that immediately recommended by their friends. Only then will the top submitters stories stop getting so much attention for standard and sub-standard articles that they may or may not have written and the little first time submitter stand a shot.
Here’s my recommendation to those of you who read this article and find something of note in both it and my response: Use Digg Spy and the Upcoming Stories cloud view. Both will allow you to see a lot more stories than the current view of the homepage and more importantly to fixing Digg and the lemming-like auto digg from friends, will force you down the curve to interesting stories that aren’t submitted by those top submitters.
P.S. Brain, congrats for getting on the front page of digg.
I agree with you that it is hard to get to Digg’s front page and that it might resemble a high school clique, but I don’t think that forming your own clique to get on the front page is the right way to solve the problem. These users that are often on the front page are the result of a system that is promoting loyalty to the sight. Although promoting the site is important I agree that the rating system that is currently used need to put less weight on users that already have a high rating. By creating a scale that is increasingly decreasing the amount of “points” that are earned for stories being dugg, Digg would be rewarding site loyalty while making it easier for new users to have there stories seen.
Great piece. I think this is ironic that your “only a clique get to the front page” post got to the front page.
You are right that a small minority of users get most of the front page results; not all, but many. I got disaffected by Digg and tuned out for another six months. When I returned, I found that most of the stories weren’t that remarkable. The core of frequenter fronters that you mentioned have dugg out the web. They’ve run out of amazing finds; so the remainder is less than amazing.
Ian – you’re certainly right; I do think a lot of the stuff that DOESN’T get up onto the homepage are spam sites, crappy content, etc.
That being said there are a lot of blogs out there that have great content (this one excluded) that have a snowball’s chance in hell of making it up onto Digg’s homepage… unless it’s submitted by one of the top users.
That doesn’t seem fair at all.
Great article, and good suggestions, too, although I think it might be quite difficult to get 50 or 60 people for a voting block.
This story made it to the Digg frontpage, now this guy is one of them !!! beware !!!
… jus’ kiddin’
I left Digg the moment I saw coRank. Now I check Digg perhaps once a week – that’s how I saw this story of yours – but I’m not an active user there anymore. I actually found out coRank when it made it to Digg’s front page. And so far I’m loving it. And honestly, if Digg implemented the features coRank has, I’m not sure I’d go back, but I can see how they would help all these issues most people have with Digg.
BTW I am in no way affiliated with coRank.
You can check my profile here: http://www.corank.com/user/Solemy
While I love Digg and still read it daily, the way stories get to the front page is exactly why I built newspoo.com.
I don’t have a paid top 25, and stories get to the top because they are voted on by the membership. We are not a Digg clone…we have a different way of doing things…we are Digg like though….
There is room…
The top users get stories to the front page because they have a lot of friends. It’s a simple as that. They have already built those alliances you are talking about. Go ahead and correlate number of friends to front page stories submitted- you will see the correlation is very very high.
Is Digg broken beyond repair? You bet it is! There’s absolutely no accountability regarding the use of the Bury button, nor about what Digg’s own employees and owners may (and almost certainly are) doing to skew the results to suit their own agendas. Conservatives’ submissions are routinely–and immediately–buried more quickly than anybody could possibly be reading them. Conservatives who dare to make any comments are roundly vilified by a small, but relentless, group of liberal Digg members. And if anybody complains about the actions of these liberal Digg members to abuse@digg.com, the victim is more likely to be banned than the abuser!
The position taken by the author of this blog is an understatement, in that Digg is far worse than any high-school or middle-school clique. Think of the Star Wars cantina scene, but without the Hollywood glamor. Think of “The Lord of the Flies,” but without the literary merit. All of the worst people on the Web are attracted to social sites like Digg, and when they get there, the site brings out the darkest sides of what passes for their souls.
Hitlerian anti-Jewish rants, potty-mouthed and often blatantly sadistic sex perverts, groundless defamation against everyone and everything, death threats and cyberstalking, and outright jihadist propaganda are daily fare on Digg. It’s such a cesspool that at least one teenager has asked an adult Digg user to stop using the site, because the teenager feels that the site is too dangerous even for mature adults!
Obviously, the owners of Digg must be perfectly comfortable with this disgraceful state of affairs – otherwise, they would have made some effort to clean up this mess a long time ago.
I just skimmed over your article, and I hope you were being sarcastic / a type of april fools joke. Those were the most retarded ideas I’ve read today
Has it dawned on anyone that maybe those top 30 or so users are consistently on the front page because they CONSISTENTLY FIND GOOD SITES/NEWS/ETC BEFORE ANYONE ELSE? And maybe Digg takes into account that they typically find sites/news/etc everyone likes and gives them a better chance of making it to the front page… I don’t see anything wrong with that at all, I certainly enjoy a vast majority of the stories I see on digg, and I don’t just focus on the technology section either I look at all the stories of each section. Lastly if you really want to see the “little guys” make it to the front page, just bury the “top dogs”….. hell I bury plenty of stories that I don’t like, for instance all these stupid April Fools jokes all get buried because I’m just tired of 1 out of every 5 stories being bogus, whether they’re funny or not. I bury alot of the pro-bush/republican/etc. stuff simply because most of it is propaganda or half the issue presented from some skewed angle, etc. I’ll bury flash games unless they’re REALLY good and innovative (Andy’s Death Rampage or whatever it was got buried for example). And the list goes on, bottom line is, if you don’t like something BURY IT. And if your goal in digg is to get to the front page then you are here for the wrong reasons, if you happen to come across something cool on the net and feel like sharing it with all of us, then submit it, don’t go trying to get traffic on your blog by using digg. If the content you submit is good enough (and/or popular enough) then you will make it to the front page. Oh and I’m 99% positive all the the strategies listed here won’t work simply because they require such a large amount of the Digg community to work, and the top 30 or so won’t follow them, as they wish to remain at the top regardless. I’ve been looking at your posts on the blog and most of the topics you covered have made it to the front page of digg, so maybe creating unique content is the issue here, I’m not saying your posts are bad, they certainly aren’t, but nobody at digg wants to read about generating traffic to your website for the umpteenth time, you know? Oh and maybe we can get your digg username so we can see what stories you’ve submitted and digg them up if we like em? I’ve been with Digg for well over a year now (maybe two? Kush has it’s down sides lol) and I literally will not miss one story that hits the front page. I may be obsessive about it but if I go on vacation I will go through every single page of Digg until I’ve seen every story that hit the front page while I was gone. Oh and the same goes for the video section. As far as the “tech-oriented-ness” of the site I believe there are MANY reasons as to why this is, and I won’t go into it now, maybe I’ll start a blog 🙂 Best of luck man, congrats on the front page.
sorry.. I rambled :/
Some good points there and your dugg.
BUT it’s not just Digg this applies to it’s nearly all of them. Take Fark for example. OK you don’t get your name up there for submitting something but the attention whores are rewarded in other ways.
When you’re looking at member profiles the number of accepted submissions is stated clearly Now the number is either one or none in the vast majority of profiles but a few have numbers in the thousands or high hundreds. Statistically that is impossible.
In a flame war I’ve read in a number of threads something along the lines of “I’ve got 2,567 submissions under my belt-how many you got?”
Then of course there is the true attention whore who will add to the comments section on something they submitted “Hey, subby here…..”
So it does happen elsewhere.
It’s slightly more flawed now then it was a year back.
Gotta say I disagree. I signed up for digg maybe six months ago. Got my first front page story right off the bat. I though it might have been a fluke too, but this week I’ve had two front page stories in a row.
So, I’ve read the stuff about the digg cabal and I don’t really see it. If you find good stuff, or better yet write your own good stuff, digg will respond.
I say we make an alliance right here right now
I can help you to get your submission printed on Page One at Digg, to get hundreds of votes for your story each time.
I’ll tell you how to do it. I’ll tell you how it is done.
You need NOT be a hacker to use the methods that I reveal.
Hackers can and probably do control many votes at Digg. Hackers use armies of droid computers (hacked computers) to vote in secret for hundreds of people who havent a clue that their computers are jacked.
The methods that I will show you here are easy to use if you have many friends or cheap employees from overseas. But you can use these methods without any help.
If you want to achieve success at Digg (provided you have no morals), then you need to be many people, many voices, not just one. You need to control many memberships, to control many votes, at Digg. That is exactly how others do it. And you can do the same.
You need to mask your identity as you sign up at Digg, hundreds of time, pretending to be many people. That is an easy thing to do, and I will tell you how.
If you want to appear to be numerous people, then you will need to use many IP’s (unique internet ID’s) as you sign up to vote, vote, vote. Software exists — legal and not — to enable you “to FAKE an IP.” Proxy servers (for free or fee) will help you to do the same.
Your ISP (internet service provider) will need to be different for every user that you pretend to be. For $500 (maybe $1000), you can use tons of ISP’s located all over the world. (Yes, of course, it helps to be rich, unless you intend to break the law. If you intend to rule the world, it helps to have deep pockets. Compared to the cost of advertising, $1000 per month is free.)
And that is how it is done, for real. There are variations, of course.
Several companies — not well know — hire people all over the world to help your submissions succeed at Digg. (They hire people all over the world to vote as you command.)
Fanatical organizations, of course, use their members as voting blocks. This can be done for free, you know. And it is legal, too.
Digg is honest, I believe. The “dishonest methods” described by me cannot be controlled by Digg.
And how did I come by my knowledge? Am I a hacker or a black hat? Do I work for the CIA? Hell no.
I read about this stuff on the Internet. Do some research of your own. Learn what people really do to dominate the internet of today.
Your stories will be buried at Digg — possibly forever — unless the people who wield real power decide to use your story as a means to their own agendas.
Can your submission get lucky at Digg? Can your story rise to the top in an honest and honorable fashion? Yes it can, of course it can, but I dont believe (much) in luck.
And now it is your turn to rip me apart. Bear in mind that many people hate me for sharing the secrets that I have revealed.
Feel free to publish my comments. I believe in democracy — and honesty — you see.
Did this page all but vanish at Digg after I published my comments?
we’ll take the lead 🙂
There is a very good reason that you’re not getting to the main page. Your articles either suck, or you’re posting at the wrong time of day.
Nice post!
And yeh, i allways see the same off 30 digg users gatting their stories on the home page.
hey try out http://www.sahie.com and try posting and voting there. i have uploaded yget template of pligg opensource there.
It’s so refreshing to read someone who understands the frustrations of ordinary digg users like myself, who try to contribute good quality content that never gets picked up.
You’d be forgiven for thinking, if you base your opinion of digg.com on the diggnation podcast, that digg is a level playing field for all it’s users, but in practise it just doesn’t work like that.
If I had a penny for the amount of times a story I’ve submitted only makes it to the front page after being re-submitted by someone else, who clearly must have had to click “ignore” when being alerted to a duplicate story submission, I’d be a (not very) rich man.
I think digg should apply behavious modeling in its algorithm. Oops! i do soudn a bit technical, but i’ll try to explain in common man’s language.
By Behavioural Modelin, I mean, we digg should track every users click, and check which story or which category he visits more often, and how well he comments on that, tis way he will be granteed with powers, weather his diggs are relaible or not. This way for unrelaible or friendly diggs, every digg will generate only 1 digg point and for good astute judge, he can aquire 10 digg points, so all depends on reputation of previous digging..
There are other sites as well who are followin same web 2.0 trend (netscape, reddit, yahoo suggestions, sukip) but i can’t find any site implementing these behavioural techniques of user, so that every user can be automatically categorized about his digging power per category …
I don’t get it. What’s the point?
So what if you submit something and it gets to the front page? Will it cure cancer? No.
All it means it that a few people found something you linked to slightly interesting. And then what? Your life is complete and you live happily ever after?
Well looks like you are on the homepage now…
Use Profigg.com instead… is much better… you can even win prizes… great..
Sorry for taking so long to get those last 14 comments up.
Props for making it to the digg front page.
@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
If you’re not interesting. You’re not interesting. Find something else to digg.
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.
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.
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 dont 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.