DownloadSquad: Why digg is destined for failure
This post was published 3 years 3 months 10 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.It is no secret that Webblogs Inc. (The owner of DownloadSquad and independent arm of AOL) despises Digg. Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis have engaged in a public ego fest, where both tech ‘big wigs’ beat their chest on who is better.
To add fuel to the fire, Jason Clarke via Downloadsquad, has posted a comprehensive opinion on WHY digg is destined for failure. He is certainly not alone in his thoughts about the destructive tendencies of Digg, as these sentiments are echoed across the blogosphere.
I reserve the right not to comment, but I am interested to know how much you agree or disagree with the article.
If you’ve ever had the good fortune of having one of your websites or blog posts dugg to the point of showing up on digg’s homepage, you’ve enjoyed a huge traffic boost to your site. This is wonderful for web publishers, and I’m not going to lie and say that we don’t care about it here at Download Squad; in fact, since the success of a given post is measured in large part by the traffic it drives to our site, it’s certainly a goal of ours to have our posts make the homepage on digg.
But how valuable is digg traffic, really, and is the digg community one that we should even care about? Unfortunately, after observing the digg community for about a year, I’d have to conclude no, it’s not. Now, at this point I should point out that AOL owns Weblogs Inc, who own Download Squad, and AOL also owns Netscape, recently converted into a social news and media voting site that is in many ways similar to digg. So if you don’t think I can be objective about this, you might want to just skip this post. But I’m not here to sing the praises of Netscape over digg either. Overall, I’m not certain that social media sites like Netscape, digg, reddit, del.icio.us, or even the granddaddy of them all – Slashdot – will have any relevance whatsoever in five years.
Okay, so now that I’ve condemned a whole class of website, or really a whole class of online community, I should point out that while digg drives the largest amount of traffic of the bunch, the community at digg is actually rotting from the inside out.
This is a very inflammatory statement to make, but all it takes is to browse through the comments on few random frontpage posts at digg, and you’ll see what I mean. The sheer level of superiority, sarcasm, and general negativity is overwhelming, and makes digg a place that is not only not fun to visit, it’s certainly not a place to “share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that’s important to you”, as digg’s tagline optimistically claims.
There is no denying that that value of digg traffic is on the low end. Aside from stress testing servers and getting your content out to the masses (albeit briefly), there is really no solid proof that digg translates into consistent loyal readership. Heck, I think most of us can agree that the majority of digg users fail to put out any effort to explore a website beyond what was linked on the frontpage of digg.
There are a few points well made, but the “negativity” debate is more evidence for the human condition than a reading of digg user attitude in my opinion. People generally don’t like each other, don’t agree with each other, and often won’t just let it be if they have the ability to make noise (case in point, the comments section with digg up and digg down feature).
There ARE some points made, but I can’t help ignore that’s it’s still a bit ironic that someone who’s indirectly affiliated with Netscape would make such efforts to write an article of this size and effort to refute any validity, purpose or value of a site like digg when clearly a sister company of the employee that wrote this attempted to make their own site failed miserably not because of the “attitude of digg users”, but because they simply stole the site model and expected to explode with success. Grow up folks, your product failed, and rightfully so. It was just a copy that frankly wasn’t that good. Weak attempt at sabotage, dugg down. :)
I agree w/ everything he says, I frequent Digg for funny stuff, nothing substantial. Elitists comments & really dumb digg up/down feature that doesn’t work keep it from being anything more that fluff, but it’s good for a laugh sometimes.
However, I know nothing about DownloadSquad & figure it’s probably the same as Digg, Slashdot (talk about elitists), and the rest anyway…