Lamenting Digg

Note: This post is over a year and a half old. You may want to check later in this blog to see if there is new information.

I like the idea behind Digg. I’m not a big fan of how it pans out, though. I don’t submit my own articles anymore, but every once in a while one gets Dugg to the homepage and I’m unprepared for it. I had been working on my server today and had disabled caching when I suddenly had over 300 simultaneous database connections and lost access myself. But that’s not what bugs me. That’s my own fault.

What bugs me is that, while my unique visitors for the day equal the total for the entire rest of the week, the pages viewed are only half as many. And reading through the comments left on Digg (rarely on the actual blog) makes it apparent that the readers gave the article a less than cursory glance and then went on to the next popular story. There’s no consideration for context or related content, the quality of a blog in general, and most of the Diggs are, I’m learning, just people’s way of bookmarking a headline that looks interesting. In my opinion, that’s a system that’s failing.

The post on my blog, which was part of the software lists series, was Dugg twice to the homepage and mercifully buried both times. But some of my more thoughtful and hopefully useful posts that get Dugg end up with 4 or 5 Diggs and rapidly find themselves in the dark and crowded halls of Digg obscurity. Digg loves fluff (top 10 lists), and moves too fast for anyone to actually judge a story’s merit or validity.

However, these failings that I’m pointing an accusing finger at are not necessarily a fault of Digg itself, but rather that of an unpredictable mass of Digg users. For as much as I’ve gained from the Internet community, I’m constantly surprised at how vicious, brutal and uninformed the general mass of web users can be.

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3 Comments

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  1. Dan Shields 01.20.07 / 11pm

    I had already read the article that you posted that had lead to this on Digg, then I saw it on Original signal as number 1 and thought hey that sounds like Circle Six’s post and I checked out the comments and thought that the users there were totally wrong about your post.

    Yes it might of been taken down because of the digg effect, but how many people are prepared to be the number 1 hit in the last 24 hours anyways. Their always talking crap about people and how they can’t take the Digg effect and bashed you on the post title and didn’t get to read the post itself or the series that you have been writing. In my opinion your series on the MAC has been way more insightful then any of the other ones I found when buying my mac I know that I will be coming back to these when I feel like going the MAC way and converting totally.

    The users on Digg that leave such crappy comments are mostly idiots anyways that think they are such superior internet browser that someone of your stature in the internet community can’t possibly offer any kind of valuable content. They go on to say stuff about why do we care about some joe shmo and what he thinks, but to be honest I didn’t find your blog on Digg and find it to be much more interesting then most posts on Digg.

    I wouldn’t care much about what a bunch of trashy Digg users think. It use to be on Digg, users were of a higher class and were of the same class of people as you and I, 25-30 years old making 50k or more but now I’m thinking we are seeing much more of the white trash side talking junk because your site can’t handle 5 billion page views unexpectedly.

    sorry to go on, but I find it pretty lame to talk such crap of your site when not even getting the chance to check out the quality of the content on the site and only 1 post of a series of decent posts.

  2. brett 01.21.07 / 4am

    Thanks for the kind words, but here’s the funny part. I posted this as an experiment to see if the influx of readers from Digg would even notice, as opposed to the usual “Welcome Digg Users!” post that always seems to go up. No flames yet, although I’m anticipating some, but it already has 17 Diggs, which is ironic because it has a grand total of 38 hits. That’s versus almost 5000 reads on the utilities post. So my experiment seems to indicate that I am correct in my assessment.

    For the record, if I want traffic, I far prefer the traffic I get from being linked from relevant A-listers, rather than from Digg, del.icio.us or even CSS galleries. I like people that come and read more than one article, leave a comment and don’t make cursory judgments. Real judgments are fine, and I’m happy to accept criticism, as long as it’s well founded and informed.

  3. Lawsy 01.21.07 / 7am

    I have noticed what you are experiencing too, albeit I haven’t had any one of my stories dugg and I don’t participate in the digg community other than to try to find interesting stories.

    Sometimes I find that an article with a particularly eye-catching title will have 1000+ diggs and just be a link to an uninformative snippet of information. To have your article dugg by the majority you must only have a title that contains a selection of keywords.

    I find myself changing my reading habits, and now I just read my 100 or so feeds in NewsFire including this blog, and never looking at social bookmarking sites. Digg, del.icio.us etc.

    When I am away from my feeds sometimes I use bloglines, mostly though If I want my news fix I just hit original signal and check out the headlines from the A-Listers.

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