A couple of days ago I started a Note asking whether Digg was getting less submissions or not. I made a non-scientific observation over the last couple of days that the frontpage articles are receiving less and less Diggs and it seems in many cases that it is taking less Diggs to make the homepage now. Tyme noticed that in her feedreader there were less new submissions being unread and so putting two and two together we reasoned that Digg may be slowing down.
Now this doesn’t mean that it is slowing down traffic wise because I am certain only a small percentage of its traffic even bothers with submitting a story. However, is this trend a good thing or a bad thing considering the amount of registered members continues to climb and you would think the number of submissions would climb as well?
It is quite possible that Digg has reached its plateau with regards to submissions. Maybe too many people have gotten frustrated with trying to get their articles on the frontpage that they have simply given up. It makes sense with so much competition (like in any free market) there comes a time when the effort your invest is not equal to the return that you get. The problem is I don’t see how Digg can fix this.
When I observed that you almost have to cheat to make it on Digg, I saw that Arstechnica achieved frontpage status 8 times in a 24 hour span and that trend has yet to stop. Seeing the same sites over and over again is becoming the common theme on Digg because they understand how the system works. While they supposedly made it harder for people to game the system, it seems they also made it harder for great articles to get noticed as well and with the amount of traffic that passes through the site this is another problem that I don’t see being fixed.
Digg expanded into new categories in the hopes of broadening their audience and it seems to have worked a little bit, but the geek crowd still reigns supreme over there and always will so eventually Digg has to plateau like Slashdot. This doesn’t mean that they can’t find ways to increase traffic with their current audience, but I don’t think they can achieve the global domination that so many people predicted months ago.
Originally posted on April 26, 2007 @ 1:56 pm