My good friend Cliff over at spiralbound.net – who suddenly finds himself the center of two of my most recent posts – posted a great little critique of the Digg.com service today which I took to heart.
He cites the following three problems with Digg.com:
1) Digg is censorship:
The way Digg figures out which story to promote to the front page is not based as much on how many people have “Dugg” it as it is on which particular user “Dugg” the story to begin with.
2) Digg users are nasty:
When a story gets “Dugg” users have the ability to comment on it. Not only are these comments usually of little to no actual value, but they are often cruel and nasty as well.
3) Digg readers generate traffic that is of minimal use to web publishers:
Having a story show up on the front page of Digg can generate an amazing amount of traffic to the author’s website. As a rule, this is a wonderful thing for any web publisher, but not so with Digg. The reason for this has to do with the way many sites earn money. Web publishers often make use of advertising on their site such as Google’s Adsense or Yahoo’s YPN. These ad services present visitors with contextual ads that they can click on should one of them seem useful. Each time a visitor clicks on an ad, the owner of the website earns some money for the referral.Digg users almost NEVER click on ads!
Cliff goes into more detail in his own post and even cites other sources while providing hard data examples from websites to which he has insider access. I post this cursory glance at the digg.com problems here only to accompany my announcement that I am no longer using digg.com on this website.
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[tags]adsense, censorship, comments, community, ctr, digg, digg.com, dugg, ecpm, elite, elite users, front page, google, hosting, hosting provider, internet, nasty comments, popularity, problems with social networks, social bookmarking, social software, spiralbound.net, traffic, user communities, users, web 2.0[/tags]
4 Comments
Thanks for the link Roderick! I’m just curious… Did you stop using Digg because of what I wrote, or did you find it to be troublesome as well?
In truth, I wasn’t at all pleased with the ROI. ;) Seriously though, the amount of worthwhile traffic that it generated on a consistent daily basis was negligible. The one benefit that I saw (though granted, my test case wasn’t for a suitably long enough time period) was the improved search engine positioning of submitted stories – for that it may be worth it. I’m still a member, though I no longer actively encourage or display diggs on the blog itself.
Another reason Digg might be having problems? Seems the “Diggers” don’t have as much authority on Digg as one might think. Update: http://forthardknox.com/?p=236
Jenn,
Thanks for the update! The behavior on the part of Digg that you describe reminds me very much of a story that I just recently heard on NPR discussing the Freedom of Information Act.
In a similar style, recently answered FOIA inquiries are coming back with massive amounts (more than usual) of blacked-out text, and the typical items that are blacked out are simply ridiculous. As it turns out, most governmental agencies are now blacking out *anything* that may possibly, at some time now or in the future, be considered sensitive – so every mere mention of any nation or person with which we may not have a perfect relationship is being censored.
This is radically different than the previous policy of “if it’s not obviously and immediately sensitive or classified, don’t censor it”.
Though I don’t know if it’s a similar policy at Digg – don’t incite any negative feelings now or in the future – or if it is a pro-Muslim bias (as Foehammer is investigating), either way it shouldn’t exist.
-R
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