Comments on: Can having too many Digg Using Readers Be a Bad thing for a Site?

By: JohnPlace

JohnPlace — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:01:38 +0000

This may be a bit off topic, but I’ve always found traffic from Digg to be damaging to my blog, mostly because Digg users have a much higher tendency to be trolls than do readers who arrive via Google search or Stumble Upon. Whenever the Diggers show up on my site, I generally end up wishing they’d go away. Same with those Reddit trolls. There’s something very annoying about the quick “sound bite” culture that permeates these two social networking sites in particular.

SU users, on the other hand, are generally interested in READING your posts, not just bashing them.

By: Fiancial Hack

Fiancial Hack — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:55:20 +0000

I have had this happen to several of my blogs. It’s quite disappointing in the sense that the really good posts don’t get a wider audience. The problem is when people start to list every post you make as digg worthy – I think tht is when this starts to happen. Obviously all aren’t, and then even the ones that are end up not getting on. It would be nice if digg had an option for the publisher to remove their own posts that they know aren’t digg worthy.

By: Slevi

Slevi — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 12:00:48 +0000

The stories about this have been going around for quite some time and there’s definitely some fishy stuff going around but I suppose they have their reasons for it at digg, a downside though is that a comment which many diggers bring up is that blog entries are generally just spam and simply trying to get their own stuff up rather than the actual source.

It’s sort of a way of saying that everything bloggers write is non-original/copied in my eyes, which of course is a bad thing since there’s many bloggers which do write original content and definitely is worth of reaching the digg front page.

By: Googlelady

Googlelady — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 09:38:58 +0000

I am not really a fan of Digg because I know from reading many digg exchange or other systems to fool digg. I think Digg should put some more restrictions on those that want to manipulate Digg. About your question, I think if you a “new” blog or a blog that is not well-known has many diggs they will suspect and that is really bad because Digg anti-cheat system is not well developed. They need more improvement after their Improvement I will focuss more on digg but at the time I will prefer others like SU and Sphinn.

By: Beau

Beau — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:36:34 +0000

@ William

This is an interview with Muhammad Saleem. Some great insight on Digg, and he is asked directly about Digging your own content. I believe it is the sixth question.

http://www.bloggertalks.com/2006/11/muhammad-saleem-insights-from-an-elite-social-bookmarker/

Beau

By: Chris Bennett

Chris Bennett — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 05:10:35 +0000

Next time you or your friends have a story organically cranking keep an eye on Digg spy especially as it gets near the top of up and coming. If you start to see a bunch of buries you could have your answer.

By: william

william — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:17:12 +0000

@Dom

“Secondly, the vast majority of blog submissions to digg are actually “spam”. That is, they’re submitted by the site owner in order to gain traffic. That’s not to say all your posts are seen as spam, but it’s likely the digg algorithm is particularly cautious when it comes to blogs.”

Um, how is me submitting original content that I wrote to Digg spam? You realize that without people submitting content to Digg there would be no point in going there, right?

I hate when people assume that if you submit your own links you are spamming the system. If you can’t handle people wanting to have their pages seen, maybe the web isn’t the place for you.

By: Amrit Hallan - HowToPlaza

Amrit Hallan - HowToPlaza — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 23:05:41 +0000

I agree with Darren that lots of crappy stuff gets promoted to the first page and some really genuine posts don’t make it. I think it could be because of the nature of diggers who have got nothing better to do but promote and bury links according to their whims and fancies. Very few links get promoted for real quality.

By: Bull3t

Bull3t — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 19:31:14 +0000

Pfft, I don’t think I will ever make the front page of Digg so I really don’t have anything to worry about, but it does pose the question as to whether submitting your best stories to Digg is such a good thing in the long run.

Ultimately, I would say yes as it gets you and your blog noticed, even if your blog does crash after you “became noticed” by to many users.

If I ever did make the front page I would have thought that my blog should be able to withstand a high amount of visitors, I have unlimited bandwidth and a reliable host. Although my blog does seem to crash on its own accord already. I really don’t know why it crashes, but it does – I need to ask my host.

By: Tim Broder

Tim Broder — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 18:50:33 +0000

A good read. I know i don’t have to worry about it though, Ive only made the frontpage twice ;-)

I do agree about they not being too keen on blog posts though, which I don’t quite understand. I write programming HOWTO’s and I don’t really see why they would deem it “better” if the tutorial was on the website part of my site, as opposed to the blog portion.

By: doug m

doug m — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:23:38 +0000

i emailed them as well darren, we’ll see if they write back, in no way did i ask for how they determine diggs, but more on if this is actually an issue that they know of, or maybe a bug

By: Nate Weiner

Nate Weiner — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:53:54 +0000

Well you could easily test the ‘buried’ theory by searching for the post on digg. It will tell you if it’s been buried:
http://digg.com/search?s=problogger&submit=Search&section=all&search-buried=1&type=url&area=all&sort=most

Doesn’t look any of them have been officially ‘buried’ per say.

By: loaverman

loaverman — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:51:00 +0000

its only bad if it crashes your server and host – but as far as manipulation and services digging stories, will be hard

By: Mike Panic

Mike Panic — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 12:53:14 +0000

I think some readers are so caught up in being a Digger that they will submit every article from the most popular blogs just to say that they were the one who submitted it. I think just about every article on J.D.’s blog, Get Rich Slowly makes it to Digg, same with other tech related blogs such as Engadget and even Lifehacker. They submit not because the article belongs on Digg but because the submitter wants to feel a part of something and look good in the eyes of the Digg regulars.

By: John Wesley

John Wesley — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 12:22:01 +0000

I’ve noticed a similar trend with my site. I’ve heard that the more popular the user is who submits your article, the more Diggs it takes to get promoted to the front page. This makes a lot of sense if Digg is trying to make the top users a bit less influential so the site is more democratic.

By: Hyder

Hyder — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:42:01 +0000

I think digg users are a very biased bunch. They scream blogspam for other blogs, but when it comes to engadget, gizmodo, lifehacker, the consumerist, ars technica etc…which are all BLOGS they happily digg them up like it was their job to do so.

By: Beau

Beau — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 08:54:29 +0000

I think there are three things working here.

First, there are some juvenile Diggers that will try to bury anything involving a blog. This is just an abservation from watching the comment section of stories that have been Dug

Second, some Digger’s dislike certain personalities. So they try to bury any story from that blog’ submissions. For example; there was a block of Diggers with a particular dislike of John Chow. They reported all of his Dugg posts as spam. Eventually, because of this group he was temporarily banned from Digg.

Third, Digg’s algorythm may have been tweaked in an attempt to detect voting networks. So, unfortunately, you may get penalized if the same reader’s are always Digging your stories. I think this is similar to getting burried for Digging your own content. The mega A-list blogs may be large enough to have enough “unique” diggs to avoid this filter.

So maybe the question should be:

Does not having enough “unique” Digg using readers hurt your blog, once your blog, or the story for that matter, gets to a certain level of popularity?

Just a few observations

Beau

By: Tech For Novices

Tech For Novices — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 05:39:42 +0000

For us novices even one or tow diggs is good enough. Yes ofcourse you can propose a theory like this.. its like bill gates saying too much money is bad for health or something

By: Ken Dahlin

Ken Dahlin — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 03:57:54 +0000

Burying stories, as it stands now, is one of the major flaws of Digg. It can allow a few people to control what hits the homepage by making sure that certain popular content does not. So, it’s not the digg algorithm intentionally thwarting popular content, as much as it is the algorithm giving too much power to too few people.

By: Wendy Piersall

Wendy Piersall — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 02:42:25 +0000

I have noticed this as well – and eMoms has only made it to the front page of Digg three times. Every single time i was accused of “blog spam” in the comments, even though the articles were original, I of course didn’t submit them myself, and they were extremely popular on other social bookmarking sites.

I believe Leo is right – the Digg community really bites off their nose to spite their face much of the time. They make content popular, but then resent the popularity that they helped to create.

But then again, the Digg community isn’t exactly known for their original thinking and maturity.