Has Digg Jumped the Shark?
March 21st, 2007
Jumping the shark - “a metaphor that was originally used to denote the tipping point at which a TV series is deemed to have passed its peak”.
Has Digg jumped the shark? I think so, and if you’ll follow along you’ll see I’ve got some very unscientific data to bolster my argument.
When I first opened my Digg account, like every other newbie, I was alone. Not a friend on my list to help get my stories to the front page. In an effort to strengthen my profile, I befriended 170 of the top users. Not really rocket science - I just used the top Diggers list to choose from the top users (and collected a couple of hundred friends). When one of these users submits a story, I Digg it. Many of these users noticed that I was Digging their stories, and in turn befriended me.
So things steadily improved for me at Digg. Many times I’d submit a story, and in a matter of hours, it would wind up on the front page. With the votes from top users, and with a little help from my friends, I hit my stride. In fact, currently 35% of all stories I have submitted have made it to the front page - not too shabby.
In an effort to ebb the growing influx of crappy content and battle the fascination of the SEO crowd, Digg engineers made a few changes some months ago. One of the most profound, and controversial, of these changes was the removal of the top users page. With no pay for their services, top Digg users felt that the least Mr. Rose and company could do for them was to honor them with a spot in the top users wall of fame. Removing that honor may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
When you are logged in to your Digg account, on the right hand side of the screen is a section monitoring your friends’ activity over the last 48 hours. Back in the day (uhhh six weeks ago??), the number of stories submitted by my “friends” typically hovered between the 400-500 mark. Which meant that the 170 people I had befriended had submitted approximately 500 stories or so over the last 48 hours. Now these are top Diggers we’re talking about here - people I chose as friends based solely upon their high user ranking.
Fast forward to this morning, and my account shows a total of 156 stories submitted by these same users. For the mathematically challenged amongst you, that represents a decline of almost 70%. 70 freaking percent! That’s not a minor decline - I’d even go so far as to call it a landslide. These top users have abandoned their accounts, and are now probably wasting their time online with some other web 2.0 time-suck.
So this is how I see it playing out: more and more top users will continue the exodus, which will in turn contribute to the deterioration of the quality of the content being submitted. The SEO crowd, and others trying to game Digg, will continue with their efforts, and an even greater percentage of front page stories will have gotten there through artificial means. Average users will grow tired of the spam (or perceived spam) and return less and less often. Daily visitors will diminish over time, resulting in a front page story that generates a couple of hundred visitors. At this point, the SEO crowd will realize that the ROI is no longer there, and they’ll move on to the traffic generator du jour. In their wake, they’ll leave Digg in shambles - a mere shell of the site it had once been.
In the end, Digg founders and investors will be left scratching their heads at what went wrong. You should have nurtured your top users - not screwed them.
March 21st, 2007 at 4:05 pm
[…] Check out Greg Hartnett’s post (A great blog btw) citing anecdotal evidence that top Digg users aren’t submitting stories at their normal pace. the number of stories submitted by my “friends” typically hovered between the 400-500 mark. Which meant that the 170 people I had befriended had submitted approximately 500 stories or so over the last 48 hours. Now these are top Diggers we’re talking about here - people I chose as friends based solely upon their high user ranking. […]
March 21st, 2007 at 5:40 pm
You can’t really get an accurate idea of what’s going on with a 48 our snapshot.
March 21st, 2007 at 5:47 pm
The 48 hour snapshot you refer to Miguel… I didn’t wake up this morning and just notice it. I have been watching it steadily decline for the past handful of weeks. Sorry for the confusion. I should have been more specific.
March 21st, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Tell the diggers to come to our recently launched site, www.highfivez.com. We’ll cater to their needs.
March 22nd, 2007 at 11:28 am
This is no different than what happened to Slashdot when the politically left-oriented users started modding any opposing viewpoints into oblivion. Once /. became a boring little echo chamber, users abandoned it. The same thing is happening to Digg. RIP Digg.
March 23rd, 2007 at 6:33 pm
No way man - Digg has lots of room to go. You are out of your mind.
March 23rd, 2007 at 6:35 pm
If people would just let it be then there would be any problems. The problem arises when some of the crowd tries to manipulate the votes and what shows up by performing dirty tricks.
Befriending people just to Digg their stuff and have them Digg yours is just lame.
March 26th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Digg has shot itself in the foot by over reacting.
April 4th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Digg’s dead baby!
As one of those so called “top users”, I’ve limited my participation to the occassional read through their RSS feed. A community should really make an effort to reward its top contributers.
April 4th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
Greg freely admits that it was only his network of friends that promoted 35% of his posts to the front page–not the quality of his submissions. There can be no more precise critique of Digg’s success formula, and that feature which has been imitated widely by other “social bookmarking” sites.
Digg apparently would like to raise the quality of its content. Perhaps the only way to do so is to drive away Greg and others like him.
April 5th, 2007 at 5:58 am
According to a recent online survey Digg is not voted the best, perhaps for some of the reason discussed above.
See for yourself: http://todayspolls.googlepages.com/social_bookmarking
April 5th, 2007 at 6:26 am
Hi, I’m actually one of the *old* top users. I had already moved to Netscape months before the top user page was axed, and right before the top user hate week that went on back in . . October?
I know what you mean about decreased activity amongst the top users, but what you have to understand is that Kevin is partially right about us: We can and are being replaced by other users. They are stepping up to take the empty spaces, but I don’t think they are keeping pace with the amount of users leaving.
April 5th, 2007 at 9:10 am
Last time I checked, the top stories on digg were getting thousands of votes, and there were hundreds of pages of submitted stories. I certainly think the de-centralization of submissions away from some nerd hierarchy of “top users” is a GREAT thing for these sites, It’s cetainly preferable to being controlled and “gamed” by the “mom’s basement”, “nothing better to do all day” crowd. I submit stories and post to a couple of these sites, digg being one, and given the amount of time even my minimal participation consumes, I know these “top users” must be housebound, unemployed or at least slacking at their real job. Maybe a lot are retired or something. Anyway, have fun at these sites, I do, but by all means, Get A Friggen Life Already, Willya?
April 25th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
I agree that it was not the good thing to do. But you can’t tell by 48 hours if there is actual decline.
May 1st, 2007 at 7:06 pm
[…] I wrote not too long ago that the top users have jumped ship - will this be the straw that sends the rest of the users packing? The revolt is actually humorous - reminds me of the temper tantrums my 5 year old throws. […]
May 1st, 2007 at 11:32 pm
[…] People are hiding it in tons of wikipedia articles that have nothing to do with it to make sure wikipedia can’t keep up. Someone even registered the domain name! It’s being blogged about everywhere in articles such as this. […]
June 8th, 2007 at 8:19 am
[…] First we had a mass exodus of many of the best users when the ‘top users’ function was removed. […]
June 10th, 2007 at 5:25 am
[…] This same principle of having a conspicuous hierarchy of regular customers applies very strongly to building and sustaining online communities. Digg, for example, used to have a list of “Top 100 Diggers” which was very hotly contested because appearing on that list gave those users power and reknown. Unfortunately Digg has now removed the list from their site, and is already starting to lose top users. One of them, Greg Hartnett writes: So this is how I see it playing out: more and more top users will continue the exodus, which will in turn contribute to the deterioration of the quality of the content being submitted. The SEO crowd, and others trying to game Digg, will continue with their efforts, and an even greater percentage of front page stories will have gotten there through artificial means. Average users will grow tired of the spam (or perceived spam) and return less and less often. Daily visitors will diminish over time, resulting in a front page story that generates a couple of hundred visitors. At this point, the SEO crowd will realize that the ROI is no longer there, and they’ll move on to the traffic generator du jour. In their wake, they’ll leave Digg in shambles - a mere shell of the site it had once been. […]