I was on a break due to some problem with my net connection and I thought I was the most luckiest person on Earth. Taking into account the recent events that has shaken the social networking world, I’m still very much alive on Digg, yes you heard it!
When I got back last night, I was welcomed by many of my friends. Babychen Mathew was the first to popup. While he asked my whereabouts, I told him I needed a break and got it. I asked him if I missed anything these days, he said “shocking news, many people banned on digg, including zaibatsu.” I said “wtf..” That was all I could say at that time! And we discussed many things about this act.
One thing Babychen was trying to say was, Digg is trying to give a valid chance for everyone. Which I thought was correct, but won’t happen any soon. There are many bloggers on Digg, and they’ve come there to promote their blogs. First they build a power profile then they promote their own. Well that’s the concept of social marketing.
What I personally feel is that Digg is trying to become more like Reddit or preferably StumbleUpon. These two give traffic even from their upcoming sections, but as it is quite clear that Digg doesn’t have a quality upcoming traffic. With the recent Digg’s Recommendation Engine Launch, they started it and later on banning people who use 3rd party scripts for Digging their friend’s submission and shouts, they continued their war!
I get the feeling that they are trying to implement these points to do the following things:
1. Increase visitors on the upcoming section.
2. Get more visits on the articles rather than blind voting of friends.
What will it mean to us?
I’ve a mixed feelings. Earlier it was very hard to crack the front page, as it required a huge amount of votes. Now, it will totally depend on the quality of the article. Now, even bloggers could make the front page regularly. I’m already seeing the lesser number of Diggs hitting the front page. This will help more and more bloggers.
It will be more tougher for a crap content to hit the front page. Earlier, even with a high number of Diggs few crap articles managed to make it. But now the power will be totally in the hands of the non-friend diggers.
I could also see that the articles are getting popular within five hours of the submit, before the update it took more than fifteen hours and heck loads of diggs to hit the front page. It made hard for a story to hit the front page in a day, hence making it an old story. So, we can now see latest news as it comes.
What points bloggers must keep in mind, now?
1. Write brilliant content.
2. Build a network.
3. Digg your friends.
I hope that Digg becomes a better place for new diggers. With these implementations they are certainly trying to cut the gap between a top digger and a new digger. But that being said, it’s certainly very bad to ban your valued Diggers. So, bring Zaibatsu back!
Manish Pandey is an internet marketing strategist and likes to write about tech, search engines and social media. To stay updated you can subscribe to the RSS Feed or follow him on twitter.
yeah man I am one of the victim of this changes of digg.That was the time when i was started good on it.It was really like a shock for me.
digg used to be awesome, now it seems like a waste of time, too much BS
Digg is still good, just use the Digg API through Yahoo Pipes and pick only the categories you want, you can then filter out keywords in the title and even filter by diggcount, comment count or whatever else. Plus you can pull the original story links, so you can bypass digg entirely if you want.
Let’s hope this is true for the little guys. I definitely think there are quality articles out there written by small blogs that deserve front page consideration just as larger sites. I feel like the problem as always been the servers though. If small blogs can handle the Digg effect then I hope the gap does in fact get smaller.
They want to have genuine stories on the home page and not just those by Mr. Manish or Mr. Salim
Absolutely. But that being said it doesn’t mean that Mr. Manish and Mr. M Saleem don’t put genuine articles.
Mr. Manish and Mr. Saleem do put genuine articles but they also keep on publishing some of the sites of their own and their clients
Nothing commercial …. thats the message …. they can make out the difference between natural activity and un-natural activity ..
Do you see the similarity between google and digg ?
And why shouldn’t people do that?
At the beginning I liked Digg very much because it has a very friendly interface and the submission was a breeze, but looking at it now…meh…it takes 5 minutes to actually digg a story which is definitely a no-no for me..
delicious is my new best friend now
ps: Hi there Manish!