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Digg and its Effect on the Blogosphere

08.30.06 - 07:42pm

Digg has become a standard in the Technology Blogosphere. Digg can be a useful tool, a source of entertainment, and an object to be avoided at the same time. Many times Digg has been compared to a drug with an initial rush and following crash, it can be a cruel thing. Here is a closer look at Digg and its effect upon the Blogosphere.

What is Digg

Digg is a modern platform to recognize interesting websites and make them visible to a large number of people. The entire Digg process is supposed to be self-sustaining with very little work in regards to administration. Ideally an active user would submit a story that he or she believed to be interesting and this article would enter a queue. Other users would be able to place their vote if they found this article to be interesting and if enough votes were collected this article would be removed from the queue and displayed on the frontpage which receives the majority of the websites traffic. Once entering the frontpage the article would proceed to quickly receive large numbers of visitors while it was the top article on the frontpage. Over time new articles would experience the same process and the original article would be bumped down and eventually be shunted over to the second, third, fourth, and nth frontpage. This process in itself is very flexible in the fact that if an article is submitted and not found to be interesting it will “die” after a given period of time. Users can also report an article as being false or uninteresting and have the article removed from the queue.

Now not all stories will reach the frontpage as is to be expected, the Internet isn’t THAT interesting. Users have the option to bury stories that are in the pre-frontpage stage if they believe the story is spam, plagiarized, or simply boring. Digg users can also comment on the articles that are presented on Digg and this feature can be very useful to determine if an article is worth reading or not. Digg itself has a little blurb to describe exactly what Digg is about; “Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community.”

Digg Users

The Troll

It has been proven that Digg follows something similar to the 1% rule in regards to user interaction. You have a small cluster of users that submit the majority of material, a larger circle of users that vote on the material, and then you have the vast majority of users that play passive roles by spectating. In general the majority of spectators account for the majority of healthy traffic with people being genuinely interested in the material that they visit but just like all social environments you will attract users who try very hard to be negative and caustic in all manners of life. These particular users have a special place reserved in hell errr wikipedia for them under the Internet Troll category. In general trolls do a good job at ruining all positive effects that Digg could have by creating random disruption, spam, and in general highly negative comments. In regards to Digg, Blogs are one of the primary targets of trolls as they offer the trolls another object for them to rant about. To some trolls blogs are considered to be inappropriate in regards to being noticed on Digg which is unfortunate as a vast amount of interesting material is posted in blogs (my own blog as example). Digg trolls can make the process of being Dugg very stressful as they tend to leave negative comments on both the particular Digg article and the blog itself. I myself have grown a tough digital skin after being Dugg severely times but the first couple of times can be quite the trip.

The Whore

The Digg Whore isn’t a new category of person but rather an old category adapted to a new environment. Remember back in pre-school there was that annoying kid that was always clamoring for attention? “Look at me, I can tie my own shoes” or “look at me I can do a backflip”, Yeah, that kid. While you didn’t know what the term whore meant at that time, this kid was an attention whore. Digg whores have simply adapted from pre-school to Digg to try and attract attention. Digg is a wonderful tool when used in moderation but when you start spamming the channel with a constant flood of articles then it gets to be a bit excessive. I will admit that I myself have used Digg before and I do like the attention. One thing should be noticed though, I have only Dugg myself when I deemed an article to be “Digg Worthy”. This particular area is the point where the crowds judgement differs in regards to what is Digg whoring and what is simply utilizing tools. One group believes that all self promotion via Digg is to be considered whoring while the other group believes that self promotion within moderation to recognize a great and unique article is perfectly OK.

The General User

Finally you have the general user. There is nothing special or unique about a general user but that is the beauty of these people. The don’t cause any problems, hurt any feelings, or flame any threads. These general users compose the majority of Diggs userbase but unfortunately their voice is rarely heard as they seem to be scared into submission with the threat of being flamed by a Troll. This is rather unfortunate as general users are the type of people that you want to attract and add to your RSS readership. The general user are the hope of Digg as they can be counted on to be genuinely interested in the topics at hand for their intellectual properties rather than their shock value. General users, we love you guys.

The Administrators

This particular group serves a vital but equally useless role within Digg. This selected group of employees for Digg sift through all the articles that are headed for the frontpage and have the final say in regards to an article making frontpage. These administrators also go about banning accounts, banning URLS, and in general trying to keep Digg clean. Unfortunately when the administrators go about banning Digg accounts they can be sometimes very unfounded such as my personal account being banned from Digg. It would be nice to receive an email saying something like “we detected that you Digg the same sphere of users, are you a bot and if not explain yourself” to which I’d reply “I happen to have a small sphere of friends that I help get the recognition they deserve”. Digg should be very self-policing due to its social structure and the ability for humans to govern themselves to an extent but administrators are still needed but perhaps with fewer powers. It is these same administrators that have been called corrupt multiple times before when users were noticing that the same authors were frontpaging abnormally often. When there is a select group of users in power there is always the possibility for corruption to exist.

The Spectator

You are simply a number in the crowd, you don’t interact with anything and you are simply a ghost. These users could be a powerful force if they would simply voice their opinion and vote for articles that interest them on Digg. These are the users that are an untapped resources, they view the website but they don’t vote. Perhaps we need a campaign on Digg with the slogan “Vote or Die” as it was such a successful campaign for the 2004 presidential election..No matter what, these users are the major force that is channeled through Digg.

The Articles

I feel that it is safe to say that the entire Internet has been submitted to Digg, twice. With Digg’s new structure including more than just Technology articles this has proven to generate a lot of spam and uninteresting articles which are quickly disposed of within the frontpage queue. Stuff that does happen to hit the frontpage usually consists of interesting bits of news, tutorials, shocking pictures, and other great works that are worthy of digital fame. If there was an article about someone walking their dog and the people they met today, this would get shot down quickly. Now if this article included a passage about how their dog took a monster dump on Steve Job’s lawn while the writer talked it up to Job’s gardner this could be considered Digg frontpage material. In general the going trend is anything Apple related hits frontpage, anything Web 2.0 related hits frontpage, and anything that slams Microsoft hits frontpage. The other stuff that hits the frontpage tends to be general tech related focusing on bleeding edge or interesting technologies.

The Digg Effect

Due to the nature of Digg and how a large quantity of users hit a particular server very hard in a short period of time, the process can create something similar to a DDoS(Distributed Denial of Service) attack upon the server. Weak servers crash hard while stronger servers tend to become very sluggish. This “Digg Effect” generally renders frontpage links useless unless the server is strong enough or the article frontpages at an odd hour such as the early morning. With the userbase for Digg increasing the requirements of a server to stay active under a frontpage load will continue to increase to the point where a dedicated server will be required. Hopefully this won’t be necessary as it could then render a lot of websites “un-Diggable”.

Digg’s Effect on the Blogosphere

Digg has transformed the technology genre of the blogosphere. Good or bad it has become a source of news for a lot of users which represents the opinion of the select few digg submitters. Digg has also become a sort of showcase of well written material at times as it is the easiest way to get your name out. If you write something great and you can manage to follow up the next day with something else great you have a chance of retaining a small portion of the original Digg readers. I have found that after being Dugg I can usually retain 10% of the RSS readers that hit my feed on a Digg day. I don’t know if this same factor is similar amongst other bloggers but it does follow along with the 1% rule I listed above which makes sense.

Hopefully as Digg continues to mature some of the rougher edges will be smoothed out and the quality of the material will continue to increase. Digg has the potential of assisting lots of up and coming tech bloggers by giving them a few hours of the spotlight to help launch them onto the scene. Digg also has the ability to completely crush a blogger with the current amount of flaming and trolling that occurs within Digg. Only time will tell if Digg manages to stay on top or if another creation can manage to overtake and consume Digg. I myself would love to see a website similar to Digg but targeted at blog users rather than tech websites but that is neither here nor now. If anything maybe the trolls will realize that blogs can be credible sources of information and not just little soap boxes for users to stand upon and rant at the world. Digg, you and I have a love/hate relationship.

Thanks to one of my readers this was submitted to Digg, so now I will whore myself out. Thanks for the Diggs but more importantly thanks for reading.

Category: Articles