For an entire year now, digging activity statistics from the social news site digg.com seem to have been dropping. If you look at the total # of diggs on all stories hitting the front page, the average number of diggs per story, the total number of comments, and average number of comments per story, all have been on a steady downward trend.
For example, September 2008 there were over 5 million diggs on stories that went popular. August 2009 less then 3 million. Average diggs per story has more then halved from its peak of about 1400 a year ago to just over 600 last month.
Why has this happened? Hard if not impossible to say for sure. From digg’s traffic graph (for US visitors according to quantcast) it appears that traffic was up for a while but now is roughly at the same level as it was a year ago so theoretically there should be (at least) the same amount of activity, right? Are people just less interested in participating now? Is the drop in traffic due to the massive controversial banning that occurred a year ago that dropped a good number of the most active diggers from the site? Or is this just a shift showing that people are visiting digg to see the news but then taking it to other platforms such as facebook and twitter to discuss it? All are plus many more scenarios are possibilities.
If you have been a user of digg for at least a year now has your usage changed? Do you digg less stories now then a year ago? If so, why? The stats are clear, there is less activity on the front page. Why do you think this is? Leave us a comment with your thoughts.
Sources: qliktech and quantcast
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Some Interesting Data Provided here. I wonder if the controversial Diggbar pushed many Digg users away. As you know, the diggbar takes a screenshot of “dugg” webpages, thereby keeping Digg users on their site and jacking up on site visitor statistics. A larger question at hand here would be, is this the beginning of the end for Digg?
Thanks for the great stats.
@RBeale
This doesn’t surprise me in the least. Digg used to be a player in the game, and they definitely still are. But they’re not the star anymore, whether it’s because of the massive bannings without cause, the toolbar bait-and-switch, or because every-once-in-awhile users can’t get anything popular because a small group of ‘professionals’ control the vast majority of what hits the front page. Either way, Digg has been a sinking ship for the last eighteen months, give or take. These trends will continue on track unless something drastic happens.
Right now, Reddit & StumbleUpon have it going on. But twitter
There used to be a cross section of issues on the front page on digg. All I see recently is a left slanted theme? it just seems like digg lives in a bubble. Sometimes interesting, but nothing that makes me want to participate any more, it’s like they’re not listening.
The stats show it.
Clearly the problem is Digg has been banning the most active and loyal users that have made Digg the success it currently is. So of course the activity is down. It’s not rocket science. hehe =)
I heard there was some sort of election around this time last year…perhaps a factor?
I think Ryan is onto something. I’m not sure the DiggBar is pushing people away, but it might change their habits. When someone shares the Diggbar URL on Twitter, for example, it might increase readership of the stories themselves and decrease the digging, since the story is now the focus of the page they visit.
The other possibility is that if traffic is constant, but front page activity is down, people might be digging and commenting on a greater range of stories. As Twitter has grown, perhaps fewer people are entering Digg through the front page and more are entering from links shared on Twitter. It would be interesting to see how the Digg-wide data compares to the front page data.
Long-time digg user. The two-fold reason I use it much less lately:
1. The overall sell-out/bro-douchebaggery vibe it’s taken on of late. By way of analogy, it’s more and more becoming a yahoo to reddit’s google – obtrusive and dumb. Also, go away Kevin Rose. Seriously.
2. Reddit comment threads are, for whatever reason, far more interesting and digg’s comment javascript chokes and just sucks overall.
I stopped showing up so much ever since they started burying ads in the article list. For some reason that really got my undies in a bundle. I bury every one of them.
That and the way I could submit an article and someone else could submit the same article and make the front page. That sucked.
As a long time digg user with hundreds of fps, I have to say, digg is getting too predictable.
The front page now only has articles from mainstream news sites and magazines. I already have these on my feedreader, so why would I want to go to digg for it?
The diversity does not appear to so much a limitation of the digg system with power users etc, but more of censorship/moderation on Digg. I see boring 1 paragraph articles from the BBC that hit the front page with 25 diggs, which the same article submitted earlier with much more info from a local news site sits with 100s of diggs in upcoming.
Might as well get rid of the users all together and set up rss feeds Digg. Nice one.
I think it’s because of facebook and Twitter. I used to digg all the time but now I copy te link and post on facebook so my friends can see and comment. They can fix this easily by linking the digg button to facebook. When you click the digg button there should be a popup asking if you want to post to your facebook account. Then they need to advertise this feature on all rev3 podcats so the word spreads.
I also tend to think that it is due to the super heavy moderation. With the purpose of bigger user diversity, they lost content diversity. A new website, can’t even imagine getting on digg, however good the content is. But a lame content from telegraph or huffingtonpost will easily be on the front page. If you see the comedy section of the website, more than 50% is from cracked.com, they could rather redirect digg.com/comedy to cracked.com imho.
They also do not enforce their community guidelines with fairness. For example: It is perfectly OK for huffingtonpost, telegraph and the like to hijack already popular content on the internet and submit to digg, but if a smaller website did it, they would just rape them.
If they bring REAL fairness to managing the users and the sites being promoted, that will be enough reason to see a real improvement in these statistics.
I used to love digg, but after many attempts at posting stories I realized that there were only an elite few who controlled the “market” given this monopolystic tendencies I felt my participation was useless hence I only went in there to look, and now because of the stagnation of stories and the fact that they are now advertising stories, I go in there less and less. They had a great thing going but got way too cocky.
In the best scenario, digg delivers a ton of visitors to your site to read a single story. They don’t click through to other stories, and when they leave, they don’t even know what site they’ve just visited – they think they found it on digg. Many publishers are realizing that traffic like this is all but worthless to them, and not chasing it as hard.