Last week, computer book publisher SitePoint relayed a story about recent experiences with Digg that demonstrates that the Digg system is far from perfect. We’ve written recently on ReadWriteWeb about the decline and fall of quality on Digg, but SitePoint’s anecdote demonstrates that sometimes the wisdom of crowds approach is, well, kind of dumb.
If you’re a fan of Digg, you’ve probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream-user base. Just how low has tech sunk in Digg? We have new data that show that the number of front-page tech stories is halving every year on Digg.
A few weeks ago, we wrote a story about humorous headline aggregator Fark.com. That story was then submitted to Digg. Partially as a joke and partially to see what would happen, Fark.com founder Drew Curtis linked to the Digg post, rather than to the original story.
By sending thousands of his readers to the Digg page, Curtis singlehandedly pushed the story to Digg’s homepage. Success! Instant traffic and a new grill for me. So, is there any way Digg can account for this? Not easily. It’s difficult to tell “authentic” Diggs from “gamed” Diggs, when you have thousands of readers showing up at a page out of the blue.
One of the oldest rivals to the community news site Digg is pointing to recent unrest at the site as evidence that the social news model is flawed.
Last week, frequent users of Digg protested changes in its algorithms that were designed to emphasize broader voting in determining which stories make it to Digg’s well-trafficked main page. Meanwhile, to Rob Malda, aka CmdrTaco, founder of the pioneering technology news site Slashdot, the chickens were coming home to roost.
In the networked Web era, influentials may not be people with a particularly connected temperament or Rolodex, or people who control and influence monopoly distribution channels (e.g., newspapers), but rather people who influence the network by leveraging the most powerful force on the web–the link. People like bloggers, top Diggers, power users, Facebook users who share lots of links, MySpace users who embed videos, Twitter users who post lots of URLs, or any social-network user with links to lots of friends.
It’s been a little more than a month since the last rumors surfaced about social news site Digg trying to sell itself for at least $300 million. A reliable source just confirmed the company’s plans, noting the company has hired Allen & Company, a tiny but influential private investment firm, to help broker a deal.
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