Once upon a time you could go to Digg and pretty much get up to date on new technology, cool sites and tech related news. Now it seems the home page and most popular posts are occupied by entertainment related items with very few tech related Diggs reaching the top page unless it has something to do with Steve Jobs or Apple. What happened?
Bottom line is that Digg has become a victim of its own success. Certain power users have learned how to game the system and are actually being paid to promote certain content to the home page. So Digg has gone from being the place to find out about the coolest, newest web stuff to something closer to People Magazine. Bummer.
How can a site avoid this? What can Digg do to purge it’s ranks of these power users abusing their status? Bottomline is that they need to re-work the way content gets on the site.
As it stands now you can post content that someone else has posted as long you claim “I swear it’s original”. In order for Digg to re-gain it’s legitimacy they need to punish users that knowingly post a new Digg to content that is already posted. This isn’t rocket science. If the URL is already posted then the system can see this and know it is duplicate content.
Meanwhile Digg’s stumble has opened the door for many other niche social bookmarking sites like Mixx and Sphinn.
What do you think? Has Digg “jumped the shark” or can it re-gain it’s stature as the king of social bookmarking sites?
I read an interesting article here: http://peelopen.com/5-ways-to-fix-digg/ about some ways that digg could be improved, and I agree with a lot of it.. Regardless, people will learn to game the system and use it to their own advantage, much like nothing is ever really “hack proof”. If you have a network of people that you build on digg, based on mutual digging, etc. and you can reliably get your story on the front page most of the time, imagine how valuable that could be. People would (are) pay an arm and a leg for the exposure you could provide. The only way to stay on top of it is to continually adapt and improve your service, or else it will fall by the wayside.
Thanks Nate, I agree, they (Digg) do need to improve their service or it will definitely become worthless in short time.
Thanks for the link. I was surprised to see that my suggestion of simply not letting the same url be submitted twice was not included in his list.
That would seem the most obvious step. A lot of these power users actually submit something that has already been submitted but since they have more influence their Digg gets more diggs than the original submission.
I read the same link that Nate mentioned. When Digg was first released, I was really excited to have this type of technology available to us. However, lately, it’s been a little disappointing, to say the least.
Good post!
Regarding what’s popular on digg, that was going to happen regardless. They wanted a broader audience and got it.
If you want to read the tech stories, the very first category listed at the top is Technology… it’s not quite the front page, but it’s still there. check it out
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Jack- maybe but even those seem those posts seem a little less relevant than they used to be, maybe there just isn’t much out there to scoop anymore with so many channels.