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UPDATE (11/24/07): Heh-heh, [why digg is blocked dot com] is NOT my site. I’ve been getting a lot of nasty comments from people thinking that it is. I enjoy lively banter but I think I’ll probably just delete the rest of the comments for this post that are in moderation. Digg fans, harass the REAL owner of that site. As for this post, well, it was an experiment of mine, I’ll leave it at that. Anyway, the post is below if you still feel like reading it.
****
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a digg user and will continue to use digg (I’m not very active though, I guess I’m more of a lurker…) and there are stories on the site that I would not have heard about otherwise. Still, I think there’s a lot to be desired and since I don’t know how to fix things I guess I’ll just bitch about them. So, my five reasons why I think digg sucks:
1. Despite being a “technology news website” it consistently features stories that are not technology-related in the least. Stories like, “OMG! Clay Aiken is GAY!!” or “Britney Spears to appear on Simpsons!!” are very common on the site.* GMAFB, what does any of that have to do with technology? It’s a little thing to bitch about but still, if I wanted that kind of crap I’d look up different sites that specialize in it. Just keep things to technology, that’s all I ask.
2. Members can be elitist assholes. I rarely see anything that approaches a rational discussion in the comments, instead, you are treated to off-topic flame wars and personal attacks, most of which involve some sort of “I’m OLD SKOOL and I’m great” type of talk. I’ve seen new members of the community ask a reasonable question only to be told to “Go back to engadget where you belong because this is Digg where our mouths are even bigger than our dicks.”**
3. Webmasters are given no warning when their site is going to be “dugg.” I think it’s irresponsible of a so-called technology community to overwhelm a web server without having a system in place that would allow the webmaster to set up some mirrors or somehow prepare his site for when the traffic comes. The, for lack of a better term, digg-effect can be devastating to a site and the bandwidth bill can get into the thousands before the webmaster knows what’s going on. These “diggers” know exactly what they are doing yet they completely disregard their responsibility for bringing a site down.
4. Digg traffic does not equal advertising dollars. Many webmasters have advertising on their sites, like Google’s Adsense or Yahoo!’s YPN and mistakenly thing that getting dugg will equal money in their pockets. This is dead wrong. The people that use digg don’t click on ads, they’re the wrong crowd for contextual advertising, and the webmaster usually ends up paying for a ton of bandwidth and lowers his click-through rate, thereby causing himself to be smart-priced out of the higher-paying ads that might have been shown on his site.***
5. Apple is God and Microsoft is the Devil. I just don’t understand why everyone has to jump all over a guy just because he has Windows installed on his laptop. You want to know something jerks? Sometimes people in the world can’t afford the Apple-tax and they have to get something that’s in their price range. Yeah, everyone knows that Windows sucks, we don’t need to hear it every second.
Well, that’s my five so I guess I should stop. I’m sure there are other people out there with different reasons of why digg sucks, care to share yours?
* No, these aren’t real headlines (that I’m aware of.) I was exaggerating for effect.
** Not all members are elitist assholes. I’ve seen some very helpful comments and it would be unfair to the nice people to call them names. Also, I don’t think anyone actually made the remark that I did, once again I was exaggerating for effect. I can’t help it, I’m a writer.
*** There are probably exceptions to this, in fact, it was a guess on my part when I mentioned smart-pricing. Who knows, I’m sure there are some happy webmasters that have gotten dugg but I’ve read a lot of horror stories.
My site recently got a lot of users from Digg, only 2% were running Linux, 2 percent MacOS and 95% Windows (1% others).
Which makes it quite funny now when I see all the comments about evil Microsoft, knowing that most Digg users run on Windows.
Yes, I find that hypocrisy runs rampant over there.
dugg.
I completely agree with your points drew… on my site I have a few posts reguarding why digg, delicious, etc suck. As well as how the digg-effect equals a sort of Digg-blindness. It encourages the skimming of a page in the website, but follow through traffic is zilch.
Yup.
I agree with you 100%.
The only reason why I deal with sorting through piles of bullshit in Digg is because they do seem to be faster then Slashdot. Things I see on Slashdot were often submitted (although not nessessarily frontpage) to Digg days before.
Other then that, the comment system is brutal, the Anti-Spam system is brutal, and the OMFG-LOOK-AT-MEEEE stories are brutal :\.
I agree, DIGG sucks big time.
Wasn’t there some news recently about Digg not being completely user-driven? I can’t think of what the story was…
RussianSurfer – I’m intrigued by your idea of digg-blindness. What do you think is a good way to counteract this effect? Do you think having quality content helps?
plus, it’s full of ajax; and that’s annoying. really, really annoying.
AJAX – Flash for the new web…
So digg is responsible for you not being able to handle traffic?
Do you realize (I’m sure you don’t) how Digg works? It’s not like Slashdot. There are no editors holding stories until they hit the front page. Front page articles on digg are put there because enough people dugg that story in a certain amount of time. Therefore there is no way of knowing which of the thousands of sumbitted storied per day will make it to the front page. Is your answer to send an email to “webmaster@___duggsite___.ext” for every submitted story. That would be spamish – and lead to a crying wolf scenario. If you don’t want traffic, why the heck do you have a site?
Digg is responsible for you not making your ads appealling enough to get clicks?
You are honestly saying that Digg sucks because the visitors to Digg aren’t stupid enough to think that by clicking the monkey they’ll win an iPod.
Digg sucks because its users like Apple?
Does Apple suck? Does MacMentor.org suck? What about ThinkSecret? It was founded by a man who is known for carrying a PowerBook (now a MacBook Pro). There is an Apple section (there’s an Apple section on SlashDot, too, btw). There’s also a Linux section. The reason you see a lot of Apple stories is because Apple does a lot of stuff. Especially in the last year – going from the PPC to the Intel chip, converting their entire line (except the PowerMac) to a different chipset – having their OS hacked to run on any x886 box, the continued dominance of the iPod – iTunes Music Store expansion into TV… These are big stories in the tech world – whether you like Apple or not. The biggest tech thing in the Windows world is “We delayed Vista… again.” Xbox 360 stories are on their alot – as are the reviews of the Vista betas. Just because it’s not all about Microsoft – doesn’t mean Steve Jobs is God and Bill Gates is the devil. If you are refering to the comments – you might see that kind of bs on a lot of forums – if you ever visited tech forums, that is.
Digg sucks because the users can be elitist assholes?
Digg is open to anyone. They let anyone sign up. There is no personality test to get it. You don’t have to be nice to leave a comment. If you don’t like a comment – mod it down. If you like a comment – mod it up. It’s called free speech, and even jackass 1 year olds who just learned a new dirty word and think they know what’s going on the world of tech can leave comments. Try to remember that.
Your comments are really shallow and don’t say anything about the actual site itself. I guess one too many 12 year olds called you a stupidhead, so you felt like you needed to bitch about the whole site.
No digg.
Speaking of sigts getting dugg — you better prepare yourself if not already. You already have 10 “digg it” points…
Chad – I know how Digg works. I’m not worried about my bandwidth but I know that it’s a problem for others which is why I mentioned it. I also had little stars where I made sweeping statements and you’ll notice that I said not every member is an elitist asshole. If you had really read my post you would know that I was exaggerating for effect in areas. I don’t think that my comments were shallow and if you read the other comments you will see that others agree with me. I did not talk about the site itself because the posting was titled “Five Reasons Why Digg Sucks” and I think I stayed on-topic.
sgent – Thanks for the warning, I find it strange that my post ended up on Digg in the first place…I wrote this post back in March and here it is almost June with people still reading it and commenting on it…People keep finding it by Googling “digg sucks” which leads me to believe that I am not the only one that has/had this sentiment. Truth is, while I was feeling persnickety when I posted this I rarely if ever visit Digg anymore, not because of reasons I stated above but rather because I just don’t find stories that I care about. I don’t visit many tech sites at all anymore because I got tired of all that stuff. I’m reading a lot of marketing blogs lately and I’m sure that will change as I tire of them and develop new interests.
Well, as of right now, googling for “digg sucks” does indeed return this page. It’s result number one.
Excellent article. I think Digg’s approach places provocative content far above relevant content. This is fine but ironically defies what the Digg community claims as virtues.
digg also sucks because:
1) it doesnt play nicely when you are not logged in, have multiple tabs with multiple stories in, then decide to login to comment on one. after login, you get directed to another story rather than the one you ‘logged in from’
2) the comment threads are fucked up. they work nice when you are not logged in. then after loggin in, they turn into an anorganised mess without any visual indication to the threads.
Digg doesn’t suck. If it did, there would be no ‘digg’ effect caused by thousands of people who enjoy using digg. Now go run off and find something real to bitch about and stop trying to get attention.
[...] This story was posted on http://drewmckinney.net/2006/03/22/five-reasons-why-digg-sucks/ author do not like digg traffic so no Digg it link here Anyway in some points i agree with autor (eg.: ads ) Don’t get me wrong, I’m a digg user and will continue to use digg (I’m not very active though, I guess I’m more of a lurker…) and there are stories on the site that I would not have heard about otherwise. Still, I think there’s a lot to be desired and since I don’t know how to fix things I guess I’ll just bitch about them. So, my five reasons why I think digg sucks: [...]
Digg absolutely does suck. The users act like they invented and own the WWW where other communities (like Fark) aren’t so hung up on themselves. The arrogance and hubris of the average Digg is pretty astonishing in that respect.
digg really sucks because
1. You get bagged by smart asses for no reason
2. You can’t delete your acount or a blog that you have made
3. People you make an article about someone that isn’t true
4. You get no benefit of submiting an article
Alot of digg users are complete dickheads they think that they own the net and if there so good at i.t. then weres there multi billion dollar company
DIGG is DIGGing its grave. Lately they are locking accounts and deleteing all your activity becuase you did something against the Terms of Use. What they said it was was not listed in the TOU. As long as I promised not to do it again, whatever it was, my account was reactivated – Minus everything I every posted, commented on and or DUGG in the past. :’(
I am devastated to say the least. What sites out there are more like what DIGG should be?
I find it very interesting that people are still finding this post and commenting on it. A lot has changed with Digg since I first wrote the piece but for some reason there are users out there that still have a negative experience with the site and, from what I can tell from the above comments, the problem lies with the users themselves.
As for my original post, I still believe that the first and second points I made are valid to a degree. The content can get out of control on Digg but now that there isn’t a focus on technology I can deal with that. I checked the “about” page just now and I like what it says, “…user driven social content website.” I think that’s a great description of what Digg is. My second point…hrm, still valid but what can you do? There are a lot of jerks on the streets as well. Somebody above mentioned that the Fark community might somehow be better than the Digg community…not in my experience…I don’t want to start pitting one site’s community against another though. Communities are made of individuals and some of those individuals can annoy most of the others. It’s the way of the world.
They let anyone sign up, but what about this:
“Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content), or for no reason at all.”
http://www.digg.com/tos
It’s not very democratic if they can delete your account “for no reason at all.”
I wholeheartedly agree with #2. With digg, I was willing to overlook the allegations of rigging, etc. because the stories were often of a pretty high quality.
But in the last few months, the comments have gotten downright frat boy (in the most cliche way) in their quality. On top of that, the same “frat boys” seem to be voting up a lot of sophomoric stuff. A lot of it’s nsfw, and definitely not of interest to heterosexual females. As a straight female myself, commercials with Japanese 15-year-olds massaging their boobs just don’t do it for me.
Sadly, Digg=the new Fark.
To address Chad’s comments:
“So digg is responsible for you not being able to handle traffic?”
Surely you realize that the “digg effect” (nice “originality” there BTW, a complete rip of the Slashdot effect moniker) produces an INORDINATE amount of traffic — sometimes far beyond what a site expects or has a budget for.
“Do you realize (I’m sure you don’t) how Digg works? It’s not like Slashdot. There are no editors holding stories until they hit the front page. Front page articles on digg are put there because enough people dugg that story in a certain amount of time. Therefore there is no way of knowing which of the thousands of sumbitted storied per day will make it to the front page.”
And yet…a ton of front page stories have these characteristics:
1. OMFG LOOK AT MEEE!!!! AWESOME! THE MOST (fill in the adjective) (fill in the noun) EVER!!
2. Liberal propaganda from ThinkProgress, Alternet and the like. Bush-bashing stories get an automatic jump-start.
3. Dupes of other stories that were submitted before, but with less sensationalistic (and usually misspelled) titles, written by high schoolers or college punks.
“If you don’t want traffic, why the heck do you have a site?”
See point #1. Traffic is good. Digg bombardment to the point of a server crash or the bandwidth budget being exceeded is bad.
“Digg is responsible for you not making your ads appealling enough to get clicks?”
When did the author ever make this claim? Now you’re just making stuff up. He just stated the fact that diggs don’t equal advertising dollars; ergo there is no real incentive to get dugg, other than some very dubious brownie points.
“Digg sucks because its users like Apple?”
It’s not just that digg users LIKE Apple — it’s the overwhelmingly childish, immature attitude that they bring to the table regarding their favorite OS, hardware platform, or whatever. I can’t even count the number of “Get a Mac” or “Haha, I use Ubuntu and never have that problem!” sorts of comments that I’ve seen from members, many times in places not even appropriate to the discussion at hand. Not to mention story headlines that are immaturely fanboyish in nature.
“Digg sucks because the users can be elitist assholes? Digg is open to anyone. They let anyone sign up. There is no personality test to get it.”
And yet…the people that are attracted to it enough to sign up, become members, submit stories and add comments include an absolutely alarming number of…you guessed it…elitist assholes. Actually a combination of elitist and immature, which is about the most annoying combination you can have, but apparently a really popular set of traits if you’re high school or college age.
“You don’t have to be nice to leave a comment. If you don’t like a comment – mod it down. If you like a comment – mod it up. It’s called free speech, and even jackass 1 year olds who just learned a new dirty word and think they know what’s going on the world of tech can leave comments. Try to remember that.”
Problem is, if the membership is overrun by jackass 1 year olds (or just plain jackasses), then you just end up with a whole bunch of jackass comments that are dugg up, and perfectly legitimate ones dugg down, many times with obnoxious personal insults to top it off.
“Your comments are really shallow and don’t say anything about the actual site itself.”
Actually I think it says a heck of a lot about the site itself. Gets right to the heart of the matter and is spot on about its inherent problems. The problems are intrinsic to the system that digg uses. It’s overrun by snotty kids, trolls and propagandists with agendas.
“I guess one too many 12 year olds called you a stupidhead, so you felt like you needed to bitch about the whole site.”
Of course, that in itself is an implicit admission that there are too many idiot, name-calling 12 year olds on Digg. Or people acting like 12 year olds; same difference. Yep, you hit the nail on the head right there.
“No digg.”
An overused term. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve seen some elitist prick say those two words….
Digg sucks. It has devolved into something completely worthless.
My daughter was posting as a user on digg without my knowledge (as digg did not fall under sites restricted to her), until she recently came to me in tears because someone had cussed her out. I started looking at digg and its users and have concluded that digg is a place for delinquents to hang out where they can make each other feel bad. Just because someone is not facing you, does that legitimize such behavior seen on digg?
i hate digg for the same reason i hate hotornot sites. this isn’t “democracy”: that’s too high-handed a word for it. it’s a popularity contest, pure and simple, and as a brief listen to top-40 radio can tell you, popularity != quality.
Conceptually Digg isn’t all that bad. It is the juvenile antics of 90% of its user base. If you look at the breadth of comments to posts pertaining to “hardcore” developer or tech resources the majority of users don’t have a clue. They will digg you down if you go against the grain of the “FanBoyisms” of the user base. I’ll stick to Slashdot.
I’ve been a user of Fark for sometime, and when I go there I expect to be bombarded by immature and insulting comments. It’s what fark is for. Digg however didn’t start out this way, and it isn’t intended to go in this direction. However much like slashdot, that’s where it’s headed. Digg was such a great site when it started, alot of great technology news with friendly readers but it’s degraded. Soon it will be that site is just like slashdot, you know full of assholes. At least Fark is funny
I have to agree with pretty much all of your points.
[...] Digg is a wonderful little site that ranks stories based on their popularity with their users. Users post stories, users vote on the stories. Then users complain about the stories that they just posted up! Digg drives a ton of of traffic to your site, especially if you are lucky enough to get to the front page of the site. So, users click over to the article on your site - usually en masse, called the Digg effect – then they leave and complain about the site they just chose to visit. For a web owner, the traffic is not only useless (it never converts into sales or ad revenue) and encourages drive by traffic. Here and gone. Very rarely will a new visitor come and try and look deeply at the site and see if there is anything else of value. Wham, bam, thank ya ma’am! Here’s a nice little entry that sums up several reasons why Digg is useless. (Fittingly, I found this by searching “Digg sucks” on Google). [...]
Here are two reasons why Digg sucks:
1. Mob mentality
2. Most people are just plain stupid. (Or “retarted
Have a nice day!
Digg suspeded my account for merely complaining to them that someone stole my story, beefed up the headline, and effectively stole over 6,000 Diggs that would have gone to my blog. For the full story see:
http://www.allsux.com
I think Digg is great at finding cool/unique stories you wouldn’t otherwise find. But then again stumbleupon is pretty good for that…
My main problem with Digg is that many of its non-tech-related sections can be incredibly stagnant.
I agree completely. I had become nothing but a dump of garbage news and pointless stories. It is simply a competition now, and people only use it for exposure.
Check out my site http://www.tweako.com , if you need some more tech. Its a digg-style like basic ONLY on computing, tech, etc. No news really though – just good information (tutorials, guides, howto’s, hacks, new software, etc)
Great article too, by the way
my biggest problem with digg is that they are totally corrupt and won’t listen to user complaints of plagiarism
Amen brother! A friend got 45,000 page loads from digg two days ago and only had a Google ad CTR of .14 and an ECPM of 38 cents! Digg traffic is complete crap and you are better off without it. He didn’t even seem to get any link love out of the deal.
[...] or Yahoo decides which sites get the best paying ads to present is proprietary technology, but there seems to be a correlation with higher paying ads being presented on sites that have a high CTR. When a story gets [...]
The #1 reason Digg sucks….
Two words… “FAN BOY”
I’m liking Stirrdup (http://www.stirrdup.com) a lot better than Digg. The stories seem more blog oriented and there doesn’t seem to be the “bury brigade” shit there.
[...] First let’s take a very biased sampling of opinion from around the Web: “For me, Digg traffic is fairly worthless. Yes, I really did just write that. It’s always been an information source not a traffic source for me … I have never really seen a blog or sites with some ads make anything worth bragging over, cash/revenue wise from a Digg blast, and if it has happened, it’s definitely a rarity or just a plain lucky fluke.” — Super Affiliate Marketing Blog “I had joined Digg last year, buying into the hype that this is something we must do in a Web 2.0 world. The belief is that the traffic that comes is great for your marketing efforts. I’ve already written about my dislike for Digg and how some Diggers gang up to get sites banned in industries they don’t like. I seem to be unable to unjoin it.” — CRE8PC “I can get traffic from these guys, but they don’t get me any clicks. To me, this traffic is worthless.” — Digital Point thread “Digg traffic does not equal advertising dollars. Many webmasters have advertising on their sites, like Google’s Adsense or Yahoo!’s YPN and mistakenly thing that getting dugg will equal money in their pockets. This is dead wrong. The people that use digg don’t click on ads, they’re the wrong crowd for contextual advertising, and the webmaster usually ends up paying for a ton of bandwidth and lowers his click-through rate, thereby causing himself to be smart-priced out of the higher-paying ads that might have been shown on his site.” — Drew McKinney [...]
I argue that Digg doesn’t suck…it blows!!!
http://www.diggblows.com
BTW, I agree with everything you say.
[...] are many posts about how Digg traffic sucks. I agree with those sentiments (been Dugg about 25-30 [...]
I WAS BANNED FROM REVISION 3 FOR SAYING AN EPISODE OF A SHOW SUCKED. REVISION 3 and DIGG both CENSOR what you say about them so their advertisers and investors don’t get scared. Fuck digg. I’m done with them… we’re making them fuckin’ millionaires and they are censoring their communities.
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title Five Reasons Why Digg Sucks. Thanks for informative article
[...] off, there are many more than 5 Reasons Digg Sucks” but here’s one: Second off, from a commentator at PJM about the Digg kerfuffle: [...]
I too myself have had my comments deleted and they were no where close to offensive other then to the product i was downgrading from the fan boy post i just buried.
I still read digg, comment rarely and can see myself in the not to distant future leaving the site completely.
It was an addiction and first but now is just a flame hole similar to what I see on youtube and most the stories quality have dipped lower then something I’d like read in my leisure.
It was fun… while it was fun.
Weird, this post is over a year old and people are still commenting on it…
I can’t even remember the last time I visited the site. At some point I removed it from my feed reader entirely so I no longer even see the headlines. Man, I don’t know if it’s still the case but the way they handled rss blows. Partial feeds are stupid and only exist to inflate page views for advertisers…eh, one more reason it sucks eh? Here’s the thing folks, if you don’t like it you don’t have to visit. There are other ways to send traffic to your site, you don’t need to get “digged” or “dugged” or whatever they call it…
Digg is fun to find weird stories…………BUUUUUUUUUT…………..Digg atracts the most arrogant dickheads ever. Same as You Tube. I definitley get the vibe of anti-bush, anti-american, very left, dickheads. I’m not political and I can see that. That means its pretty bad.
Great idea for the guys who started the site but its a shame the users are ruining it.
Well, damn, if “digg sucks” on Google gets you here on the first link, there’s a good reason why you’re still around. I’ve been on a kick to participate more in social media sites, and with Digg, I still feel like I’m struggling. I echo a lot of what’s been said about how the inane posts generate a lot of thumbs-up. I try to post something substantive. One quip got me some feedback (it was anti-Bush) and another one had me canned (talking about some lame video from Halo 3). It’s really hit and miss. I did it so that I could get a little more traffic to my blog, but I think I’m spinning my wheels a bit too.