Digg.com Suffers Under Regime Change

www.webpronews.com ^ | Dec 30, 2009 | Jason Lee Miller

[BreeLee]

Powerdiggers Stealing Stories, Promoting Them

It seems all good things are corrupted or abused eventually. For Digg.com, habitually, a better choice... SEOs, thanks to aggressive blackballing by the Digg “bury-brigade,” were perhaps the earliest and most blatantly ostracized group muscled out of the prevailing purist community there—no salesmen allowed. Marketers and PR flaks effectively excommunicated, internal drama is free is to ensue as “powerdiggers” are accused of setting up a Digg.com good ole boy network.

Exhibit A is a submission ironically making the front page with screen-grab side-by-side comparisons of, as the title suggests, how the average Digg user is. . .cheated. The image shows two Digg submissions with identical titles and thumbnails. The original submission, posted an hour before its duplicate, received only 21 diggs. The second, made popular by a so-called powerdigger made the front page with 2752 diggs.

....The coalition of outcasts has primarily blamed two Digg.com features,....the ability to form friends lists and “shout” to those friends about news stories a user wants promoted.

“This is why many Digg users have stopped submitting,” says one commentator, “they know it is highly unlikely their submissions will make the front page no matter how good their content is, but a power Digg user can submit something dumb like a photoshopped picture of pac-man at a graveyard and it will rise to the top, not because it is all that good, but because of the submitter's connections.”

Users have suggested switching to rival site Reddit.com, where submissions are anonymous. Others have proposed an algorithmic penalty system such as the one in use at Flickr that seems to devalue group submissions and add value to unconnected simultaneity. Still others, over 1,100 of them, have signed an iPetition.

[BreeLee]

I noticed this about Digg within days of joining the community, I think I may have done a half a dozen posts that always got buried within 24-48 hours by someone else even though it was almost identical. Too bad, so sad, they really had a good concept there.

[AmericanGirlRising]

The exposure of Digg’s problems cannot come soon enough IMHO. The site is full of anti-American stories Dugg to the front page and ripe with online bullying and profanity galore.

Since it is frequently used by DBM to confirm the popularity of a story, Digg needs a nuclear-sized clean-up to give it any type of validity in the future.

[Inappropriate Laughter]

I have an idea...there might be a market for a right-wing version of Digg...

[Tanniker Smith]

I've been following this for about a couple of weeks now. I registered at digg back around October because of someone at FR wanted some articles freeped. (We were hopelessly outgunned over there.)

But I hung around because I wanted to post links to my webcomic. I've posted a couple dozen links over the past month. Never a comment. One managed 3 diggs.

I get very little traffic from them, compared to, say, Stumbleupon, which sends bunches of people my way. (Granted, a link for just a single day on the front page of "Irregular Webcomic" sent me more traffic in that single day than I had in the rest of 2008 combined! So much for social sites!)