Digg long reads
Apparently, I'm not the only one who struggles to get an article recognized on Digg.
Right now, a lot of bloggers and tech pundits are talking about the death of Digg.
If its traffic history is any indicator of its future,
it doesn't look good.
But maybe there is hope for a social network on its way toward demise.
What the heck is Digg?
Digg is a social news site where people can submit news articles, videos, and stories, and vote on their favorite ones.
The vision was to be an alternative media source, finally democratizing the news.
In the early days, it was the key to “going viral” with your content. These days, not so much.
Why it may be dying
The sad reality is that Digg
didn't
democratize content. Unless you were as sneaky as a crooked politician or a power-user, you had little hope of ever getting to the front page.
According to some, even if you
did
make it, you couldn't stay there or make it back easily.
So, the loudest, not necessarily the best, voices were rewarded. And the best voices fought back.
Brian Clark (creator of Copyblogger) wrote off Digg in 2007, criticizing them for allegedly “burying” his articles.
Darren
How Reddit killed Digg
The so-called Web 2.0 - It could be seen as some revindication of the Internet after the wild financial speculation blew up the stock market in the late nineties, in what is known as the dot com bubble.
In the aftermath, there was a sense of caution and an undeniable optimism for the web's true potential, beyond the savage greed of some investors. And fortunes were made but this time based on real value.
Web 2.0 may sound like some technical upgrade to the web, but it wasn't. The concept was more about a new approach to creating websites and apps and how people interacted and expressed themselves on the web.
Social media is probably the primary outcome of that new interactive web, and companies like Facebook or Twitter started building their empires at that early age. But others did their thing too, like the social news website digg.com. It also rode the wave and had a taste of greatness. Just not for too long.
Digg was a massive website for sharing news back in 2005. In that boom of the interactive web, it became famous for allowing users to vote for their favorite stories. The most voted would hit the front page, making it a democr
Executive Summary:
Digg was a social network and news aggregator platform that
enabled members
to submit
and rate
news stories, pictures, videos, and other types of content
across a multitude of categories.
Digg failed because of poor product decisions, rising competition from other platforms, internal problems amongst its staff, and users trying to game the system for their own gain.
What Was Digg?
Digg was a social network and news aggregator platform that allowed users to submit news stories, pictures, videos, and other types of content.
The platform itself had a voting mechanism, meaning users could either upvote (‘digg’) or downvote (‘bury’) a submission.
The most popular stories would then be promoted on Digg’s front page. Alternatively, Digg also offered selected category pages, such as ‘music’ or ‘science’, to which stories could be posted to.
Stories that were inaccurate or spammy would then be moderated by simply burying them (and thus not giving them any relevance or exposure).
Each submission would then link out to the actual source through which users could click. Within Digg, users were also able to comment on stories.
At the heart of Digg’
Digg loses a third of its visitors in a month: is it deadd?
Back in January 2006 we asked "Will Slashdot be overtaken by Digg?" The idea at the time that the venerable "news for nerds" site could be surpassed in popularity by a two-year-old site didn't seem tenable - until you looked at the numbers. Those showed that Digg was rushing up on Slashdot - and later that year it passed it for pageviews and unique users.
But now something's happening at Digg. Data from Compete.com - image above - shows that after ticking along at about 37m (and as many as 44m) unique visitors for the past year or so, user numbers have fallen off a cliff - from 38m in March to 24.7m in April. That's a 35% drop, and below the 26m it was claiming back in June 2008 when we interviewed Kevin Rose, Digg's founder.
That means that it's close to falling below Twitter (the orange line on the graph), though it's far above long-term rival reddit, also shown on the graph (the green line). (Reddit is now owned by Conde Nast.)
What's happened? Is it just a blip? Something odd in the way Compete collects data? Since Twitter and Reddit don't show comparab