People soshalize. They don't care how it's spelled. They just do it.
Did you notice? There seems to be a paradigm shift going on over at Digg that hearkens to the cries of users and publishers alike longing for the glory of old. It would appear that for the first time in over a year, Digg senior management is not only listening to the users, they’re acting upon what they’re hearing.
When Digg first rolled out “Staff Picks” late last year, I was extremely excited. Here was an opportunity for Digg to use their front page real estate to highlight stories that were not getting the traction that they would be able to get on other social news sites like Reddit or StumbleUpon where quality matters more than promotion. I thought, “Now, let’s get some unique, viral material on the front page.”
I was wrong. It has proven to be a wasted ploy to try to get the attention of sites that not only don’t need the traffic but who consider Digg a minor blip on their radar (if they even consider them that anymore).
We’ve been planning on this story for a while but it’s been challenging finding a piece of content that fit the criteria. It needed to be very close to being equally popular on both Digg and Reddit, plus we needed the site owner to be willing to share their analytics data with us. Thanks to our friends at Techi, we found a case study story.
Update: Not only is Digg back, it’s back with a vengeance. Stories are flying on at ludicrous speed. It was likely a bottleneck of promoted stories that weren’t appearing on the Top News section due to some coding change. Things look like they’re about back to normal now.
There has been hope building up surrounding Digg.com for a few weeks now. Changes are rolling in nicely. Traffic seems to be steady and on the verge of climbing. Spam is all but gone.
Today, a good chunk of that progress is overshadowed by the most stagnant homepage in, well, forever.
19 stories have been promoted to the top new section in the last 24 hours. Compared to the glory days of V3 when 90-140 would be promoted on a slow day, this doesn’t speak well for the struggling social news site.
Update: Digg confirmed that it is an experimental feature they’ve been “playing around with for weeks” that is not available yet to the public.
A new button appeared tonight when I visited MyNews on Digg. “Trending” is now the default sorting option for some users who visit their personalized Digg page.
When I originally posted this article on Techi, I forgot to take one major thing into account. Most people who are passionate about their favorite social media sites are often blinded by their feelings. They understand the need for change and innovation but often do not take honest feedback very well.
That was the case with these questions as I received a barrage of emails, IMs, and even phone calls from people telling me that their favorite sites “are doing just fine, thank you very much.” In most cases, I replied with a terse but honest response.
“Wake up.”
If there’s one thing that we’ve learned from MySpace, it’s that no matter how big you are you can fall if you don’t adjust. Social media is mercurial with it’s rate of change and as a result many (most?) who have fallen over the years did so because they didn’t ask themselves the tough questions.
The implosion of Digg is happening. It is an unstoppable conclusion to events that have been in motion since last week and will continue until the full implosion event similar to to the final shrinking of the universe.
Then, today, it changed. Digg’s front page algorithm started resembling the old promotion algorithm. Familiar sources absent from the Digg front page for a week came back.
Everything went better than expected.
Over the last week there has been a lot of criticism aimed at Digg.com and some of the publisher accounts and celebrities who are getting their news to the Top News section of Digg ahead of higher-quality content. Leo Laporte has been at the center of much of the criticism as his Google Buzz updates and podcasts have flooded the front page over the last week.
Mr Laporte, I owe you some kudos.
Today, Laporte switched his feeds of podcasts and Google activity to his Delicious feed. While this may not seem as natural as manual submissions, it’s a huge step in the right direction as he must actively bookmark stories to his Delicious account for them to appear on the page.
In other words, he is manually vetting and selecting stories that he finds interesting rather than feeding everything that Leo likes about Leo.
The result? A digging and submitting pattern much closer and more manual than anything other major recommended accounts are doing. Did Leo Laporte just go from public enemy #2 (sorry, Reddit is still #1) to hopefully the trendsetter that other major accounts should follow? We’ll see soon enough.
A new CEO. Kevin Rose making promises of upcoming changes. A brand new ox-related error page. Things are looking up for Digg.
Then again, they couldn’t look any worse than they have been for the last few days.
After getting 20 stories to the front page of Digg through their publisher’s account (often with less than 30 Diggs prior to promotion), Mashable finally seems to have struck out. There’s a story that has nearly 200 Diggs at the 11 hour mark. Does this mean that Digg is finally being fair with its algorithm, or is there a certain level of mysterious timing with this particular story not hitting:
Wait, NOW you’re going to make Mashable get more than 20 Diggs before hitting the front page? Come on, Digg. The only thing you have going for you right now is consistency.
