The Digg Bury Effect

If you’ve got praise for Microsoft. If you endorse Republican policies. If you believe in helping people optimize their website using SEO. If you have anything positive to say about Netscape, Reddit or Yahoo! Suggestions - it’s time to stop relying on Digg for traffic.

Digg has come under increasing fire as they continue to tread deafly through the internet world. Kevin Rose inspires the entire organization to arrogance that carries through to corporate policies and down to the Digg Mob that buries stories it doesn’t like simply because they don’t like them.

The problem with Digg is in the democratic system. Or rather the non-democratic system. Diggers on the surface have the ability to Digg an entry or bury an entry. This is great in an honor-system kind of way because every vote counts (how often have we heard that mantra?) and every voice matters. If the community doesn’t like something, a sufficient number of “Burys” will stifle the story. If the community finds a story worthwhile, in theory, the story will have legs.

Unfortunately, the Digg system is seen to be rigged. Sources that are often buried for a variety of reasons, are soon flagged as spam sites. When a sufficient number of people, particularly influential people as most of the stories promoted to the front page are a result of a handful of elite Diggers, band together with an agenda and are given unchecked power (Burys have no paper trail), then points of view found to be contrary to the agenda are suppressed. Little Green Footballs is experiencing that right now.

I also experienced that early in the month when I wrote an article pertaining to an SEO tactic. That article made the Digg front page and within 10 minutes was off the front page. Every other time a story has hit the front page, the story has stayed there for a significant amount of time. Fortunately, I’m not (yet) on the spam list, though I presume that after Digg Week this week, I will be. :-)

I generally view Jason Calacanis as a bastard, but I have tremendous respect for what he has accomplished notably at WIN and then at AOL with the Netscape project. Jason has also been at frequent odds with Digg. In fairness, this is for two reasons: he’s not afraid to call Kevin Rose on his crap and secondly, he reinvented Netscape and in my opinion made a far superior product to Digg. Jason really hammered the point home when he called Kevin Rose out on Monday regarding Digg’s non-accountable burying practice.

The problem is that Kevin Rose is deaf, as alluded to earlier, and somehow navigates through the internet world completely blind to what the world around him thinks of his product and completely deaf to how to improve it and completely non-verbal about how he feels about the complaints. To me, lack of these critical senses is simply termed ’senseless’.

Steve Fisher inaugurated yesterdays blogging on Technosailor with, in my opinion, a great article about things Digg needs to do to stay alive. It’s a shame it hasn’t received more attention. In private conversation, Steve predicts Digg has one year to live. In his entry, he gives it two, simply based on the economics of finding an exit strategy in the possibly waning economy.

Things to think about as Digg continues to self destruct in the public eye. I personally could care less if I ever see the front page of Digg again and, in fact, am considering rerouting traffic coming from Digg to the bit bucket - just to keep the classless behavior off my blog. Instead, I’ll be looking to gain traction with other sites such as Netscape and del.icio.us. In fact, that’s tomorrow’s contribution to Digg Week.

Related Digg Week Entries

• CASE STUDY: HP Gives Consumer the Middle Finger
• The Digg Mob
• 5 Things Digg needs to do or it will die in 2008
• What George Orwell Can Teach Us About Digg
• Gaming Digg: Is it a game when the money isn’t Monopoly Money?

• 
• Stumble it!

About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He is Business Development Manager for Lijit and he worked as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.