March 3rd, 2007
It Matters Who Diggs You
If Digg were truly a democratic system, it wouldn’t matter who Dugg your story, just so long as it got into the system — then democracy would work its magic. But the fact is that it does matter who Diggs you. I just noticed that my last post was Dugg, but then I saw it was submitted by a user who has never had a story reach the Digg homepage despite having submitted over 20 stories to Digg.
None of the stories that Stephen Harlow has submitted to Digg has every received more than 9 diggs. This may be in part a function of Stephen’s story selection, which appears not to have interested the Digg community, but it is also likely a function of his lack of friends.
Without friends, nobody knows or cares when Stephen Harlow submits a story to Digg, and friends voting for friends’ stories probably drives a fair amount of digging on Digg.
The lesson here is, as with everything else, it’s all about who know. Digg, to its credit, is fundamentally social. The success of Digg users in getting stories to the homepage presents as a long tail in no small part because of the power of Digg’s social network, and the ability of top diggers to work the network.
The bottom line in this instances is that, while I’m grateful to Stephen Harlow for digging my post, and while there’s nothing preventing it from being Stephen’s first homepage story, I’m left thinking that I probably would have been better off with a more connected and successful Digg benefactor.
Topics: Digg | Social Media | Social Networking
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Publishing 2.0 writer Scott Karp is ruminating on how to get good story placement on the social news bookmarking site Digg. Scott found that one of his posts had been dugg (voted for) by a Digg user - but the story got little play beyond that because the submitter has no friends in the community.
Isn’t Digg better likened with a meritocratic society rather than a democratic?
Sad (sniff) no friends. Would it have been better had I not dugg your post? I feel I’m adding a more mature voice to Digg, hoping to help lift it out of adolescence. Maybe it’s in vain, I hope not.
Stephen, in reality, I’m more than happy that you dugg my post — while your efforts to lift Digg out of adolescence might well be in vain, you have do have my support.
Well, you titled this post correctly Scott, now you just have to become friends with someone in what is known as a “Digg crew” to market your post to the top. Another thing is post timing, you should have prepared your crew to hit it on Monday morning to pull the most attention and traffic.
But in all seriousness, try to get a conservative titled post in Digg, talk about putting a damper on democracy. Sad.
[…] Who cares who submits it? Well, if your goal is to get your post frontpaged, you’ll care. Because people who have acconts that a) been around for a while have submissions that are “worth more” [more likely to float to the frontpage] and b) accounts that have tons of friends are more likely to accumulate diggs faster. […]
I think you should change the name of your blog from publishing2 to publishingaboutdig2much.com.
I challenge you to not write about dig for a month and see what happens to your readership. You are riding the dig wave.. but at the same time keep complaining about it, typical of the ungrateful steward.
Scott, i challenge you. Don’t write another story about digg and see what happens to traffic to this blog..
Rons,
Thanks for your comments. I’m afraid I cannot accept your challenge. Ever since I started this blog there have been topics that have captured my imagination, e.g. MySpace, Google, YouTube, Digg — these are at the center of the transformation of media that has always been the topic of this blog.
As for writing about Digg, when I look at my stats, it hasn’t really been much of a traffic boost, except for the one time that a post I did about Digg got to the homepage of Digg, but that was a while back. Writing about SEO has done more for my traffic lately. But my guiding principle has always been to blog my convictions — sometimes that brings traffic, sometimes not.
In any case, if you find that this blog no longer suits your needs, that is unfortunate, but I’m sure you’ll find that there are many extremely high quality blogs on media and technology that might well suit you better.
There are diggers who have over 600 submitted stories and 0 of those have reached the front page. Pity I can’t remember the names now (:. And yes, it definitely does matter a lot who diggs you, although with the recent changes in Digg’s algorithm maybe getting dugg by a certain person can have negative repercussions as well.
Yet another reason to prefer Reddit - where it only matter what the news is not who is suggesting it… that was supposed to be the point of Digg wasn’t it? Digg in theory is about taking control away from big media players, but now it just gives it to a new concentrated group - so what’s the point?
[…] Karp tells you why your article never makes it to the Digg homepage: “As with everything else, it’s all about who [you] know. Digg, to its credit, is […]
Excerpt from Blogging4Business:-Publishing 2.0 writer Scott Karp is ruminating on how to get good story placement on the social news bookmarking site Digg. Scott found that one of his posts had been dugg (voted for) by a Digg user - but the story got little play beyond that because the submitter has no friends in the community.
Publishing 2.0 writer Scott Karp is ruminating on how to get good story placement on the social news bookmarking site Digg. Scott found that one of his posts had been dugg (voted for) by a Digg user - but the story got little play beyond that because the submitter has no friends in the community.