Digg is no longer a Social “News” Site
Posted on April 21, 2008
Filed Under Digg, Social Media
As much as I have enjoyed Digg over the years, it is officially no longer relevant as a social news site. The concept that social “media” can be pictures, videos, podcasts, or articles is great, but what I witnessed tonight was both enjoyable and sad.
The enjoyable part was that it is raw, clever, and something perfect for this age of YouTube and Flickr where people can be bold and become stars by doing odd things. Some of the things they do work incredibly, others fail miserably and become complete tragedies of shame — the line between the two potentials is often extremely thin.
In this case, it worked (for now). The submission had over 3000 Diggs 45 minutes after hitting the homepage on a Sunday night (US time). It will probably break 10k. Over then next couple of days, it will be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. The kid will probably (hopefully) get a prom date out of it, whether it’s the intended target or not.
BUT……
As one respected Digg member said, “I was doing some troubleshooting of SocialBlade Sunday night when I saw an image hit the front page at 389 diggs. At first I thought I had found a bug, but then when comparing the data from ajaxonomy and the current front page of digg I saw that the data was correct, or very close to being correct at least. I kept refreshing digg and saw the image was getting almost 100 diggs a minute, and this trend continued for about 45 minutes until the image made #1 with 3036 diggs in the top in all topics list for today.”
“I see how it’s related to digg and how people could be interested in it, but I consider digg a news source with the occasional humorous piece thrown in, and stories/images such hitting the front page, and especially doing so well, are starting to make me think digg is no longer the best source for news anymore but rather turning into the likes of another fark.”
Looking at what has been the most popular stories of this particular 24 hour period, I have to agree.
These are all entertaining. They’re all fun. Still, it begs the question: what happened to the news?
* * *
Read more Articles about Digg on this blog.
Comments
5 Responses to “Digg is no longer a Social “News” Site”
Leave a Reply
We Love Subscribers!
[…] Read the whole article about how Digg is no longer a social news site. […]
I couldn’t agree more — I’ve moved on to digg-like sites that are specific to niches that I’m more interested in, like designfloat. I’m actually more nostalgic than you are — rather than the social news, I miss the days of digg when it was primarily a technology-oriented site.
I’ve been seeing more and more blog posts, similar to this one, about how digg’s quality is diminishing rapidly — it’s too bad.
That’s just sad, especially if 4/20 is making the homepage of Digg. Really says quite a bit about the majority Digg’s users.
If you’re going to say that, think about this what happened to technology? It used to be about design/hardware and programming - if it goes back to that, 90% will leave.
its still ok. but seem to be going down hill.
————-
http://www.youyap.com