Angry in the Great White North

For those who don't know yet, digg.com is a self-regulating content aggregator:

Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.

At the bottom of each of my post is a button with which you can submit the post to digg, or vote for those stories that have already been submitted. I'll submit the ones that I think are worthy myself. With the added traffic yesterday because of the Deb Frisch incident, I started accumulating diggs. By the evening I was at over 30 diggs, and near the top of the Upcoming list. Coming back to the computer after a few hours, the digg count was at 90, and growing at two or three every 10 minutes. The traffic was spiking dramatically as well.

I had been bumped to the Popular page.

When I turned in a few minutes later, hits were at 400 and climbing. What would the morning show?

It showed that accumulating hits in the Upcoming arena is not too hard, but when you hit the big time, everyone is a Simon Crowell.

The user community on the Popular page is far more demanding. Though I was getting hits and getting diggs, I was also accumulating votes to "bury" the story. Many voters were of the opinion that the story was too too narrow in interest to belong on digg. After anough bury votes, the story was dumped, and my traffic crashed to regular levels.

The speed at which it happened was remarkable too. The story didn't even survive an hour.

Still, digg operated as advertised. My story was presented to far wider cross-section of readers, the significant number liking the story. A critical level of digg users did not however. Though the algorithm is not described, I expect it is a matter of ratios. The more people who digg the story means more people have to vote to bury the story to get it removed. Clearly I was accumulating bury votes faster than I was getting digg votes, and hit that deadly ratio before the first hour was out.

Interestingly, my story did not get dumped from the Upcoming list. It suggest that either the readership is different, or the criteria people use to evaluated stories is different. I think it is the latter. I think the critics stay out of the Upcoming list, or are not nearly as demanding, allowing the digg mechanism to bubble up popular stories. But all bets are off once the story becomes Popular. Like a tall weed, my story got cut down very quickly.

Still, a lot of readers did like the story, and I hope they come back to the blog on their own to read more.