Comments on: Digg Front Page Activity Sees Drastic Drop

By: Digg removes avatars, raises Digging limits

Digg removes avatars, raises Digging limits — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:00:54 +0000

[...] has been that the decrease in activity, ie number of Diggs, to a story was a result of the limits placed on Digging. People were having [...]

By: Mark Moran

Mark Moran — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:56:04 +0000

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.

By: Episode 12: Dead Diggers Tweeting

Episode 12: Dead Diggers Tweeting — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:24:55 +0000

[...] Digg Front Page Activity Sees Drastic Drop 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. [via SocialBlade] [...]

By: Capicuaman

Capicuaman — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:13:52 +0000

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.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:28:01 +0000

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.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:03:46 +0000

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.

By: johnny

johnny — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 12:29:27 +0000

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.

By: Clickbank Product Reviews

Clickbank Product Reviews — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 05:05:06 +0000

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.

By: jimmy

jimmy — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:43:35 +0000

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.

By: David Leonhardt

David Leonhardt — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:25:35 +0000

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.