I've been creating user voted systems before there was a digg and they all have a fatal flaw. There are a extreme group of hardcore users that end up controlling the voting system. People think that digg is democratic but it is the furthest thing from it. As this blog post here shows, 66% of all stories posted on digg that make it to the homepage and pushed there by the same 60 people. Digg is essentially a community of 60 unpaid editors, and eventually the only new hardcore editors to join digg will be those with agendas and interests like the core group. This is because people with different interests will leave as they are pissed when their stories don't show up.
Now the netscape digg clone at beta.netscape.com has human editors to balance out the "user editors". This in theory should keep netscape grounded in the mainstream and stop cliques from forming that push agendas. The new digg clone is headed by Jason Calacanis at AOL and judging from the lack of rants on his blog the past few months they must be working hard to find ways of giving this thing some traction.
June 15, 2006 at 6:06 pm |
There you go Markus why don’t you come out with your own version? Or if you are too busy then partner with some one who can handle it. People with sites such as yours are the ones who can really drive a new site to success. I have a biz directory that has achieved some success. It has 17k pages and gets hit quite a bit and crawled by every spider every day. That site has been able to drive every other site I have to some success. Use what you got and see what happens. I do agree that Digg has problems. I read that site every day and have noticed the same members drive the site much of the time. I mainly notice this because of the sometimes very obscure subjects that make it to the front page. It is very obvious there is a very narrow focus of interest that drives that site. I think if I ran it I would not allow someone to vote again within a set number of days to keep the influence of what gets on the front page driven by a larger pool of users and interest. Games are a perfect example, some times it seems every 3rd post is about games.
June 15, 2006 at 6:54 pm |
I enjoy your posts but dont understand your logic in saying “digg sucks”. Only a week ago you were touting two ideas for making “a lot of money” online that included “digg clone” and “digg structure”. So if I follow you, you can make a lot of money with sucky ideas?
June 15, 2006 at 7:07 pm |
There is no difference between a forum, a blog and digg.com. Each one presents the same information just in a different interface.
Digg is a good idea, its just the implementation that sucks. Just like altavista was a good idea but the implementation sucked and google perfected it. The model that will win here, is a digg that is customized around your preferences. This will most likely take the form of you signing up and answering a couple of questions on your interests. After you have answered that you will start getting a customized version of digg. Ie you say NO game posts, no Hardware posts etc.
I don't want to create a clone, because there is not much money in it, and it is way to time consuming for me.
June 15, 2006 at 8:31 pm |
As far as money goes I really would not have thought anyone could do so well with a free dating site ether. I do think it all comes down to the interface. If it was done as you describe then the user’s interest would be much more targeted and thus adsense could be quite effective to monetize the site. I do somewhat disagree with your idea about making it more targeted though, but this is only on the true digg level. I think this would work if the circumstances were a little different, read on and I’ll explain. I want to see everything and I don’t mind skipping most of the stupid game post on digg. I thinks digg’s problem does revolve around an over concentrated sphere of influence, but remember digg has been able to become popular despite this over-active small group. As for the question of how to monetize it better I would have built the site with a secondary page with the full story posted there then a link to the site the story was about. This page could then have been much more successful in displaying targeted ads. The soup is spoiled though as now with the little blurb as a headline and the direct link right to the site the story is about I think no one would put up with a digg clone site built as I described. Oh it might go someplace if it was done very well but it would never overtake digg. I think in fact there are a few out there now doing it that way now. It just goes to show that the original digg builders planned the digg site poorly. In the end everything does come down to money and if the site concept does not generate the required amounts of revenue then eventually the site will flame out if expenses overtake income. youtube.com is a perfect example Digg clones done on certain subjects and driven by large entities may be viable. I think sex would sell well in this case. In other words I think a digg clone done well about celebrity news would be cool. I may try one about local news in my little town. We don’t even have a local TV station here so we are at the mercy of the local paper who gets lots of complaints about how it does things. This is the cool thing about your Blog here Markus. I get lots of great inspiration from hanging out and reading your post.
June 15, 2006 at 11:37 pm |
“There is no difference between a forum, a blog and digg.com. Each one presents the same information just in a different interface.”
I agree. 90% of success is how well something is executed, not the idea, which are a dime a dozen.
June 17, 2006 at 12:12 am |
Hi Markus,
Congrats on the success! Agree with you on your Digg comments. We launched a site http://diggol.com that is along the same line of customizing to each user’s preference. I just started a blog and quoted this blog http://pingit.wordpress.com
June 17, 2006 at 12:14 am |
[...] Community based filtering may help in filtering out useful information, but cannot be depended on because they tend to either favor superficial stuff or be manipulated by small groups with agendas. Community based news sites like Digg.com or the new Netscape beta may have the buzz now but may not be right for users with serious or specific interests, see this post Digg sucks, Netscape digg clone not much better and this post “60% of Digg’s front page is the top 0.03% users.” [...]
June 17, 2006 at 4:22 pm |
I’m wondering how many digg folks are hitting on this site hmmm? The comments here are as thought provoking as the posts. I’ll be back. Thumbs up!
June 18, 2006 at 8:47 pm |
digg should have ups and downs, like newsvine. I found digg interesting at the beginning, when you disregarded the comment sections. Now, I check it out a bit, but I find my news elsewhere.
June 18, 2006 at 11:15 pm |
[...] There is a large problem with the memediggers. It turns out, and I am not surprised by this, that 60% of digg's front page is controlled by 0.03% of users. Here is another post covering this fact. There is a lot of buzz generated by the new Motorola Q. This site reviews all the uses that you can get out of this phone. They also have a bunch of youtube videos explaining these uses. [...]
June 20, 2006 at 5:54 pm |
Saying that Digg isn’t democratic doesn’t make any sense. It *is* a democracy, from the ground up. It’s the behaviour that is emerging from the democracy that you have a problem with.
June 20, 2006 at 10:58 pm |
[...] There is a large problem with the memediggers. It turns out, and I am not surprised by this, that 60% of digg's front page is controlled by 0.03% of users. Here is another post covering this fact. [...]
June 26, 2006 at 2:06 pm |
Unwise Crowds and Web 2.0…
James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds became popular in the same general time frame as Web 2.0 morphed into a major buzzword for a more interactive, user-involving Web. The main premise of Surowiecki’s book is that groups often “k…
July 2, 2006 at 7:37 pm |
http://popurls.com has netscape listed now, too
July 20, 2006 at 3:18 am |
Netscape’s digg-clone not doing so well?
I wrote about the new Netscape site a while ago (back then it was in beta), which was basically a Digg clone meant to replace their traditional news portal site that had been in its current form ever since AOL acquired them. The idea seemed great – co…
September 15, 2006 at 3:02 am |
Geez, it’s been a couple of months and I am still unable to signup to Netscape. The confirmation email has a bad URL so I am unable to confirm. At least Digg works!
January 9, 2007 at 3:49 pm |
For help and advice removing and avoiding spyware
January 17, 2007 at 10:52 pm |
[...] find that people over there are rude. Apparently a lot of other people think the same about Digg : Digg sucks, Netscape digg clone not much better. The Paradigm Shift On ABestWeb there are plenty of rude people, that I encountered. I left that forum never to return [...]
April 6, 2007 at 11:35 am |
Digg is completely corrupt. Everyone should know that. If you don’t believe it, check out the proof: http://allsux.com … not only does it give a compelling personal story of how Digg can screw you over, but it also links to high-profile (and low-profile funny) sites related to Digg sucking.
May 10, 2007 at 7:32 am |
I find the Digg community to be totally juvenile. The site works, it will be a success but it’s always going to be directed to a particular niche. The US centric content irks me too. I did find a new startup with an alternative that filters news by country (http://www.frack.it), it hasn’t got much content yet, but I’m going to try it out for a while.
June 4, 2007 at 7:05 pm |
Personally I prefer the system they use over at Stirrdup (http://www.stirrdup.com). If a user shows interest in a story be it positive or negative, it counts as a “vote”. So more controversial stuff has a chance.
June 6, 2007 at 11:39 am |
I disagree on the customized digg.
News are interesting because they give insight to something unknown.
When you drill down to much you lose the news aspect.
daniel from http://www.vybr.com
June 23, 2007 at 6:50 pm |
Maybe some of you like http://www.ogog.org better ?
It does differentiate between those who can blog, and those who can click, and it allows for posts to be rated from many different viewpoints…
September 4, 2007 at 9:08 am |
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Im glad i found this blog, will be sure to keep an eye on future
October 7, 2007 at 5:03 pm |
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June 16, 2008 at 1:34 pm |
http://www.diggtr.com is the place to share your favorites and to communicate with others that share your interests.You are the editor and if your story is popular it will be published on the front page.