Did they Digg their grave?
 

Digg - Top in 24 Hours

Anyone familiar with social news websites knows that Digg imploded over the weekend. Is it a temporary rebellion, or did Digg commit seppuku?

Don't people do the same thing when Facebook redesigns?

Not really the same. The users of Digg are in effect sending all of Digg's traffic to a competitor. When people have a hissy fit at Facebook, they don't hijack the site and send everyone to MySpace.

Well this means one of two things:

1) They aren't different enough from their competitors (they don't have a competitive advantage)

or

2) They changed in a way that made their competitors more appealing (they just lost their competitive advantage)

Or maybe there's a third:

3) Their users are so brand loyal that they're hijacking the site until the developers give them what they want (welcome to the collaborative society of the Internet, where your users are also your employees/associates/reps/consultants, for better or for worse)

Maybe I should include some background on the hullabaloo--
How Digg Got Spanked By Its Own Users

The automatic posting is available to all users, not just major publishers. This is a whole bunch of something over nothing.

Like 90% of user-generated the internet, it's petulant posturing. But for a site like Digg (and Reddit), whose whole raison d'etre is cultivating the hive mentality, having the hive abandon the nest (or sabotage it) is death. I don't know that Digg can bounce back.

What does Digg do exactly? I live under a rock and I don't have a Facebook.

Based on this post I assume it's like Reddit.

Which is basically like the forum at SomethingAwful.

No one has ever been curious about the "Digg submit" buttons on 90% of online articles? Or the button on the bottom of this very page?

It's basically an Internet popularity contest.

Huh. I always assumed TFP users were a bit more web-savvy. I guess I was wrong.

Dude, this is a forum.

It's like the cassette tape of the Internet.

I'm sorry, Fugly. Some of us have hobbies that extend beyond the reaches of the Web.

And screw you guys, I'm going to go watch Johnny Mnemonic... on VHS.

9er, do you have The Net on VHS too? It was on TV recently. The cell phones and laptops they have are awesome...because they're all "leading edge" technology.

Sadly, no.

My favorite part of The Net, aside from the gigundo tech of yesteryear, was how they were attempting to pull off a clip of Wolfenstein 3D as some radical new game. That and referring to it as "The Net" is hilarious. It's like the web is a puslating gelatinous monster that eats your girlfriend.

I know I'm a friggin' cro-mag. I realize this. The last computer I built was a Pentium 100mhz. Do I see the cute little icons at the bottom of every post? Yes. Do I have any desire to click on any of them? No. The Facebook icon tells me pretty much all I need to know about their usefulness in my life. Granted, I would click del.icio.us if it dispensed breakfast cereal. Anyway, not using something doesn't necessarily make one unsavvy.

I mean, it's like asking some dude on the street if he's seen X porn site. Sure, he's seen porn. But that particular site? There are zillions.

/this rant brought to you by the beverage that is as Cold as the Rockies (TM)

funny as reddit is a small division of Conde Nast.

I just went to look at the site again.... Digg "has a broken axle."

I for one only know small areas of the interweb, like Fark, TFProject........
And I'm proud to be analog (mostly).

I know ABOUT digg and reddit, but I really don't care to join in on the circle jerk. I try and keep up about new trends on the intratubes but rarely do I join in on it.

...unless it has cute kittens... which is why icanhazcheeseburger.com takes up a lot of my "it's 7:45 am and I should be working but I'm not" time.

BG is right, forums are old school. Typing? TALKING about things? Why not just post 55 LOLcat images and lots of smileys. Yeah, that's the internet I know.

Just because you are ON the internet, doesn't mean you use every resource on the internet. I do NOT facebook and could care less about it. There are people who facebook (I like how facebook has become a verb <?>) who don't know that AOL used to be all about chatrooms or that you don't need to start AOL 9.0 to browse the internet.

Hell, I found out last week that my mom lurks on two small business (for women) forums. I asked her if she posts and she told me she didn't feel like she needed too. I told her she was "lurking" on a "forum" and she told me she had no idea what I was talking about. I explained but I think I was talking to a brick wall at that point.

I visit about 5 sites on a regular basis and the rest are sites I just happen to be at. Digg and Facebook and Twitter are not on my list.

I get all kinds of traffic from digg, but I rarely go there myself. When I do, it's because my cartoon was reposted and I like to read all the comments describing how much I suck. (BTW, apparently I suck a lot when a political cartoon. I suck slightly less when I make a bad pun. And I'm brilliant / not funny at all when I do an academic cartoon.)

I visit Digg with little frequency. But I can't say I am that much of a big fan. I prefer google reader.

I avoid a lot of the newer link-aggregate websites since they seem a little too 4channy for me and I'm not a fan of their UIs. I stick mainly to slashdot, the occasional lifehacker visit, a couple dozen forums and webcomics, and talk to non-nerd friends using facebook while studying (yes I do get good grades). Fark is my one exception by dint of both age and the fact that their content is almost strictly real news articles and I find the headlines alone worth reading.

Digg on the whole always seemed to me like it was basically 4chan with links instead of pictures.

They need to learn from 4chan not to piss off it's users.

Then again, I don't go to Digg. Fark actually is funny and they do some work. I waste enough time there.

I'm a huge digg user (1000+ comments from me and thousands of dugg articles) and I have to agree that the site sucks dick now. Not sure what I'll do now *tear.

Come to reddit (where I JUST cracked 10,000 points of comment karma). It's good. You'll recognize several of us there.

Sheah, I don't want any of you mofos to find me on Reddit.

^^ I fucken LOVE reddit :hearts: Reddit is a riot, ... lol. Whenever I'm reading a thread there and I have something to say, by the time I'm done reading the majority of the posts, I forgot what I was gonna say.

I still have the original 10 karma points I was given for signing up though ... :(

I really like the pun in the title - did you think that up yourself; how long did it take you?

I love puns (sweet, malleable and succulent puns).

- - -

add:
Reddit's not bad now (regarding as: it's a fine service, as the competitor to Digg) , as I get a fair share of web articles and random finds from there, but I'd absolutely hate to be a member there. It's too much like being a John Smith in a Roger Starmasher world. The personalities and overall "mentality" I find there is I do this for the laughs and the nostalgia pretty much; staying on-topic is for losers. It's not all like that, but it's becoming more of a frequent occurence to see.

I've never used Digg. I have no idea how popular it once was, or how far it may have fallen from there. I do recognize it was once very popular some years ago, though now, it looks pretty much vacant ( to the casual observer like me, who only goes there once a season).

Reddit is awesome, and if you use it and don't join (or don't use it at all), you are doing yourself a huge-disservice. The whole point of its awesomeness is to be able to have essentially a customized news feed on the areas that interest you, rather than a one-size-fits-all experience. Don't care about programming? Don't subscribe! Don't care about politics? Don't subscribe!

There hasn't been a morning wacky news story in years that I haven't already read thanks to reddit, and it's also the perfect way to stay abreast of current events, both geeky and IRL. If something is important and on the internet, it *will* be on reddit, and its granularity makes sure I only have to pay attention to stuff I care about.

I'm concerned the Digg migration to Reddit will destroy Reddit. The Reddit servers are problematic enough as it is.

Did you read the blog post they put up about that yesterday? It appears that the Reddit Gold cash infusion helped them stay up during one of the biggest days in the site's history.

I've been pleased with the way Diggers have been folding into the reddit culture, by and large.

This whole fiasco has spurred me to install the Reddit app on my iPod touch. First impression wasn't bad. I'm sure it's way better with an account.

I feel the same way about Something Awful. With tens of thousands of active members, someone will post a thread about anything important. They've also beaten cable news and most web news to the punch on a lot of major stories, and every time there's an ongoing incident on something like a shooting spree, the Times Square bomb, the Gaza Flotilla Raid, all the UFO and meteor sightings in the past few years, there are people there giving information from the scene or nearby, putting up live feeds or just posting when they hear something, and it's all hours ahead of when the news outlets get it.

Guys, thanks for the info regarding reddit/digg. I respect the consensus views I get
here at the Tilted, so I might just check out reddit.:thumbsup:

There is much to be had at Reddit.

Really wish I had discovered it much early. But sometimes the only way you find good stuff is through nefarious Google searches.

Reddit can't hold a candle to TFP in many regards, though. You won't find the Facebook-esque sense of community, though.

In other ways, it's just like TFP: lotsa witty banter from various subject matter experts, talk of guns and cars, and women posing naked.

:lol:What? TFP doesn't do THAT!:lol:

I'll let Jazz clarify that for you.

Me no understand, I no get the interwebs talky-ness.:rolleyes: