Digital Musings

It was in November that I first read about Digg.com being put up for sale.However this rumor quickly died down. But now after about a month its come up in the open that Digg is has put up a price tag of $300 million and has hired Allen and Company which specializes in Media deals to find buyers.

Allen & Company traditionally uses an “event” to do what it terms “direct research” on potential buyers and sellers, then inserts itself as banker. You can read more about how they do it, here.

I found the news about Digg being on sale, quite amusing as recently I have read a lot of stuff about Digg, that tells me, lot of people, specially top diggers, are unhappy with Digg. I am a regular Digg user but haven’t been a very active member.Maybe I started using Digg, when it has passed its golden period.

There have been many strong reactions all over the blogosphere about this proposed sale. Some of the Top Diggers I know have actually opposed this sale and suggested anyone who might be interested not to buy Digg. Tamar of Techipedia.com, is one of the Top 40 Digg users. You can see the list of Top Digg users here.

On Digg community is everything:

Like any other social networking website, on Digg you can form your own community of fellow Diggers, who have similar taste as yours and share news and stories. This was the initial idea behind Digg. Although now a days, instead of a wide range of users opinion, some top users can drive a story to the front page where it gets maximum attention. So the reigns of a particular story or website and the consequent traffic generated is in hands of some Top Diggers.

From Democracy to Oligarchy to Autocracy?

Digg has always been seen as a reliable source of informative stories, mostly about technology, with the backing of user generated content. This was the “hit” formula which made Digg so popular. Its was all Democratic atmosphere. Later, as Digg became more and more popular, it was targeted by spammers to gain traffic. The quality of content went down. Also many of the Front Page stories were the ones submitted by a specific set of Top Diggers. A few guys started influencing the content which wasnt exactly “bad”, as most of these guys were hardcore Digg users, and mostly brought forward good posts. But not all, submitted quality content. As it is true or all social networks, popular Diggers got more friends and had a good following, due to which stories submitted by specific users got more exposure than others and some good stories were left behind. As some like to call it, It became an “Editors Playground”

Digg has some rules about how the content is submitted, and if a users submits a potential Front Page story, he should get the proper credit. Thats the reason for the Duplicate Story Filter. Now these rules are for all users new and old alike. But is the owner of the website exempt from them? Read on, to know How Kevin Rose is actually free from these rules!

Digg’s Popularity Decreasing?

Since I started using Digg seriously, I have seen its traffic decrease steadily and the traffic related ranks go down. Does this mean Digg is becoming less popular? Not necessarily, some may argue, but there has been a lot of discontent in the Digg community and lot of users have stopped using Digg. Some have taken refuge with other bookmarking sites like, Mixx and ShoutWire. Digg receives less traffic, as compared to same period last year. The graph from Alexa.com shows the trend.

I dont know if this is a technique to pacify the Digg users who have been banned, or a Publicity stunt, but the Mixx.com community has a section named Digg Refugees. TechCrunch has an interesting post about it here. This is also one of the reasons why Kevin Rose is having difficulty finding interested buyers at the price tag he has specified.

Kevin Rose: Where art thou?

I have always seen Kevin Rose as an idea guy. After all he came up with something as innovative as Digg. Kevin is considered as a poster boy for the Web 2.0 crowd with his name listed in the Forbes Top 25 Web Celebrities list. There has been a lot of account banning activity in the past few days, and a lot of people are not very happy about it. Is all this happening with your knowledge,Kevin? What happened to the community spirit?

As Tamar as quoted on her blog:
Just remember, Digg and Kevin Rose: you built the platform. We, however, built the success. You can turn your backs on us if you want to, but don’t expect to get things done the way you want it to be.

Tamar has written about how her friends who were hardcore Digg users got their accounts banned and why she is losing faith in this system? If you want o understand how healthy a website is, ask its users and they would tell you whats happening. At present they diagnose Digg not to be in healthy spirits.

Another interesting fact that she brought fore was, How the account of a 17 year old kid was banned because he created a Digg-FaceBook group saying its an attempt to launch an attack, and after a few days Kevin himself created a FaceBook group which got more than 1000 votes. The story with screen shots can be found here.

Digg, Auto Bury: Reality or Myth?

Now this is one scary feature on Digg. There exists a list on the Digg servers which has names of sites and their urls, which would get buried after submission. Digg has always denied about censoring content. They say its a user driven website and only other users can bury Digg stories. So is it your jealous competing blogger who is burying your stories or, its the system thats stealthily working against you?

Here are some interesting stories about Digg’s auto burying system . One of the most read blogs about Copywriting, Brian Clarks CopyBlogger is on the list. He has written about it saying Ding-Dong-Digg-Is-Dead.

Another famous Blog Pronet Advertising attests to this fact with evidence, that Digg is censoring content.

Dont get me wrong, I have been an active participant on Digg since last few months, but its now I understand the system properly and have started communicating with other Digg users. No wonder Digg is so addictive. Its a really cool concept, and if you get involved and give enough time to it, you would get hooked as well.

With all this going on would an interested party go for it and buy Digg or seeing all this commotion in the community that drives it, stay away?

So What is your opinion?

As a user driven website, Digg has really taken a path which leads to absolute Rule and only the content that they want would go to the Front Page. I think this would really suck as the whole democracy idea totally takes a backseat. Do you think this might change in the future or something can be done about it. After all we are also a part of the Digg community, would you see it deteriorate like this?
Please let everyone know whats your opinion in the comment section!

Digg is a phenomenal revolution is UGC, that has opened an entire dimension to the world. But the fact remains that there is just an inequity that haunts it.Reddit and Netscape as well had these problems.

Digg is great in that it is positive, but the bias towards top users and friends have left many great stories with just a few diggs because the submitter did not have many contacts. Do you think these are the problems plaguing Digg?

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