Digg.com - A Conservative Movement and How You Can Help

This is my first post here, so I apologize if this is breaking the rules. Also, let me go ahead and apologize if there is a huge strong Digg following here. I wanted to write this as if many here are not familiar with Digg.

As stated just above, I'd like to talk about the social news site Digg.com, and how we can get more involved to promote the news that we feel should be getting more coverage and to "bury" the far-left news that consistently gets lots of traffic. Lots of really good, important, legitimate news gets very little, if any coverage at Digg. A perfect example is that many (nearly all) of the ACORN stories got voted down so fast many didn't get a chance to see them at all on Digg.

Background: For those of you not familiar with Digg, Digg.com is a social news site. Users like you and me can submit stories, and then other users can either "Digg" the story (vote up) or "Bury" the story (vote down). Stories with a lot of votes subsequently make it to the front page. Front-paged stories on Digg get tons of traffic.

Digg.com currently has a pretty heavy left-leaning group of followers. This means that all pro-government, pro-Obama, anti-Glenn Beck, anti-Sarah Palin and other similar stories constantly make it to the front page day after day. These stories get lots of traffic, and this is traffic that our stories and our news is missing out on.

Occasionally a story from the right will hit front page, but it is usually buried and disappears within minutes of doing so. Quite franky, I'm tired of this. We could have a larger following than the left at Digg and finally get the news that WE want to see promoted.

In order to accomplish this, all we need to do is get involved. It literally only takes a few minutes out of every day to go through the upcoming stories and Digg/Bury the stuff that you like or dislike.

Getting started is really easy. Go to http://digg.com/register/ and make a new account. That's it, you're ready to go.

To see the upcoming stories, click on the 'Upcoming' link. To filter through all non-political stories, hold your mouse over the 'World and Business' link (second link from the left, top navigation) and then click on the down arrow that appears. From that menu, click on the 'PoliticalNews' link. You are now viewing all stories that are 'upcoming' in the Political News section. Side note: An upcoming story is simply a story that has been submitted, but is in the process of being voted on or buried to see if it is front-page material. Not all stories (most stories, actually) will not make the front page. But, your vote counts nonetheless. After you go through 2-3 pages of upcoming in the Political News section, mouse over the World and Business link, click on the drop down arrow, click on 'PoliticalOpinion' and repeat the above steps.

Most of the time, you can choose to Digg or Bury a story based on the title and excerpt of the story alone. It literally takes me 2-3 minutes several times per day during down-time to check on and Digg/Bury the upcoming stories every day.

This is exactly what the left does, and is one reason why liberal stories are very popular at Digg. We have the power to finally turn this around, and I know the FreeRepublic community can get it done.

You may or may not be interested in this, but another thing I like to do is auto-bury anything that is submitted from the Huffington Post. Most of the Huffers are active Diggers, so nearly every single Huffington Post story gets submitted on Digg, and a fair amount of them eventually end up making the front page. If you're interested in easily auto-burying all Huffington Post stories, just go to any Huffington Post story and scroll down to just above the comments box. There, they have a section called "HuffPo Stories Surging on Digg" and will have links to their top 4 stories that are accumulating votes. From those links, you'll be taken right to the story where you can automatically click the 'Bury' button and vote their stories down.

We definitely have an edge on the left with our talk radio and TV, but it's without question that they dominate us in the online space. With news and opinion in the middle of a huge transition to blogs and social sites, I think it's important that we get more involved sooner rather than later.

Seth_Stuck is the resident pro-Digg advocate. He posts lists of Digg articles that he asks FReepers to digg/bury. Please contact him to get involved in the Digg effort by FReepers. He has the list of FReepers who participate at Digg. I posted articles with links to his lists for awhile, but have become busy with other things and have stopped doing so lately.

Here are a few threads to review.

09/04/2009: Conservative News That YOU Should Digg!

09/03/2009: Conservative News That YOU Should Digg!

What is Digg? And why should I care?

I commend your intentions, spirit of purpose and energy and welcome you to FR.

I regret, however, that Digg may be a lost cause. Its user base is almost exclusively a collection of leftists, statists, misanthropes and/or college dorm room-bound angry young men.

Digg has been reduced to a pointless daily crabs-in-a-bucket click-war where mockery, anger, and countless instances of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. Differences of opinion are ALWAYS accompanied by ad hominem attacks.

Its eternal focus on video games, ‘hot babes,’ toys, cartoons and sci-fi films should tell you all you need to know about the demographics of its user base.

On the bright side, Digg’s power, influence and popularity have slipped badly since it first fascinated the media who, always, cannot tell the difference between a fad and a trend.

Far from being a barometer of the hip and happening, it is instead a stagnant Internet backwater of arrested adolescence, sexual/social frustration and embarrassing Poli Sci 101 naivete.

We could have a larger following than the left at Digg and finally get the news that WE want to see promoted.

You're trying to influence a Liberal news site. Why don't Conservatives create their own damn news site??? Like what Jim Robinson did here. Or what Andrew Breitbart did. You want something like Digg, but for Conservatives? -- then create it yourself!

I've been saying for years, Conservatives should start their own entertainment network. Then our entertainment won't come out of the sewer known as Hollywood. But has it happened? No. Go back to sleep!

I still can't believe that my friends here on FR don't get this. Look:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+freerepublic.com/

Digg brings in about 44 million yearly unique visitors, FR just about 1.2 million. There's simply no comparison. This is a nice echo chamber, but in terms of publicity, FR can only do so much. And, like it or not, any Republican that hopes to claim the White House is going to have to find a way to convince independents. Convincing independents cannot happen unless independents are getting the message you're projecting, and they're not going to get our message if we conservatives limit ourselves to exclusively conservative sites. That's not how social media works.

Also, Digg is not a "liberal news site." It's not even a news site. It's a social bookmarking site. It doesn't generate content, it only reflects the favored content of its community. The more conservatives we have on Digg boosting Conservative stories, the more exposure those stories get. As mentioned earlier, I run the premier site for Conservatives on Digg. We regularly manage to get stories on the front pages of Digg. We're breaking down the liberal strong hold there every day

Are the majority of people on Digg liberal? Yes. Are they all liberal? No. I'm in contact with hundreds of conservatives on Digg. It only takes a few hundred diggs for a story to make the front page of Digg. And while the couple of thousand active liberals will likely "bury" anything we get on the front page there are a couple things to consider.
1) While there are a few thousand active liberals on digg... there are millions of people browsing the content. It's a basic tenant of PR that if you want your message to be heard, you have to get it in front of people. We can do that on Digg regardless of what the few thousand liberals do with our stories ex post facto.
2) Liberals only have the majority on Digg for as long as Conservatives allow them to have it. It's a social bookmarking site. It reflects the will of its community. If we amass a large enough Conservative base on Digg, the stories on Digg will reflect that.

There is no reason whatsoever for Conservatives to forfeit the world's largest and most successful social bookmarking site to liberals simply because they set up camp there first. It's not a liberal site - it's a social media outlet with a mostly liberal community. And we could change that and reap all the rewards if we'd just get out of our own way.

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