What happens when Digg plateaus?
A couple of days ago I started a Note asking whether Digg was getting less submissions or not. I made a non-scientific observation over the last couple of days that the frontpage articles are receiving less and less Diggs and it seems in many cases that it is taking less Diggs to make the homepage now. Tyme noticed that in her feedreader there were less new submissions being unread and so putting two and two together we reasoned that Digg may be slowing down.
Now this doesn’t mean that it is slowing down traffic wise because I am certain only a small percentage of its traffic even bothers with submitting a story. However, is this trend a good thing or a bad thing considering the amount of registered members continues to climb and you would think the number of submissions would climb as well?
It is quite possible that Digg has reached its plateau with regards to submissions. Maybe too many people have gotten frustrated with trying to get their articles on the frontpage that they have simply given up. It makes sense with so much competition (like in any free market) there comes a time when the effort your invest is not equal to the return that you get. The problem is I don’t see how Digg can fix this.
When I observed that you almost have to cheat to make it on Digg, I saw that Arstechnica achieved frontpage status 8 times in a 24 hour span and that trend has yet to stop. Seeing the same sites over and over again is becoming the common theme on Digg because they understand how the system works. While they supposedly made it harder for people to game the system, it seems they also made it harder for great articles to get noticed as well and with the amount of traffic that passes through the site this is another problem that I don’t see being fixed.
Digg expanded into new categories in the hopes of broadening their audience and it seems to have worked a little bit, but the geek crowd still reigns supreme over there and always will so eventually Digg has to plateau like Slashdot. This doesn’t mean that they can’t find ways to increase traffic with their current audience, but I don’t think they can achieve the global domination that so many people predicted months ago.
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Its funny you wrote about this. The last few days I have been observing the stories that have hit the front page, and I was really not impressed. It has seemed that more junk stories have surfaced in recent weeks/months.
They need to rework the system. They may need to take the Google approach and begin blacklisting users that trending tells them are perpetual front-pagers, or groups that always vote together. Seems like a drastic measure, but at the same time, it’s not a popularity contest of who makes the front page the most, it’s a news site.
By Kyle Johnson on April 26, 2007 5:19 pm
Yeah I’m very curious to see what their situation is like by the end of the year.
By Scrivs on April 27, 2007 3:56 am
[...] Running a community is a fine balance between making the users feel empowered and doing what is right for the site. We come across such situations a lot over at 9rules and fortunately have done pretty well. For everyone that thought user-controlled content sites was the wave of the future you better think twice. It will be interesting to see how the site looks in a couple of hours and what the aftermath of all this will be. Almost funny that just last week I asked what happens when Digg plateaus and not too long ago what would you do if you were the CEO of Digg. [...]
By Digg, HD-DVD and the True Power of Community on May 2, 2007 12:47 am
[...] What happens when Digg plateaus? This entry was posted in Link, Uncategorized and tagged googreader. Bookmark the permalink. ← ● Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Book 6) by J.K. Rowling Adobe open sources Flex, Joyent eats words → [...]
By What happens when Digg plateaus? | Waking Ideas on January 30, 2011 11:13 am