Decaflon

Digg by it's very nature/design can never be original. The whole point of it is people posting stories they find other places.

Any level of moderation, social or not, delays those stories appearing.

Digg is irrelevant to me... I wouldn't even bat an eye if they fell off the planet tomorrow.

Like Ozone said, by its (no aprostrophe) very nature it can't be totally original. Not to mention it's overrun with children or at least adults that behave like them.

I would say the largest problem with Digg is that it is amazingly effective at getting a crapload of traffic to your site in a matter of hours if you're lucky (or cheatsie). We had a post that never even made it out of up and coming, and yet still we recieved over 150 hits within the course of 2-3 hours from it. The amount of lingering/return traffic is abysmal, but I can't so it's useless because I found one of Scriv's sites through Digg and that's how I ended up ultimately getting interested in 9rules...so at least some good comes of it once in a while.

I lost all interest in Digg, Slashdot, etc months ago. It's all the same reposted crap posted over and over to oblivion. It's cheap entertainment at best, and reality TV BS normally. I rather hang out here, at least there's something interesting. :)

I'm with Right On. I never use Digg, if it were gone tomorrow I'd never notice.

digg is probably the place only to learn of the hotest stuff going on but hey thats something good at least. The problem is that there are so many stuff online and you can get rather lost.

The bad thing about digg is that people start digging in all sorts of information which floods or "covers" other great topics.

Do you think in any way digg can be improved?

I don't use Digg.

I don't know, I don't think anyone can deny the significance of digg. It's the big dog of social networking so it's going to get crap no matter what, but I think it's still a valid resource. I visit it every day and usually find very cool stuff.

Plus getting dugg is great. My top five pc game article got dugg like 3 weeks ago and my visits per day went from like 10-20 to 170-200. Anyone who says digg residual traffic isn't high doesn't know what they're talking about and I have the google analytics screen shots to prove it.

So some of us just aren't really what you would call "diggable", and to those of use who are not Digg is virtually useless.

I'm embarrassed to say I actually rewrote the words to "Thrill Me" once and retitled the song "Digg Me" and posted it on my blog. Most of my readers had no idea what Digg was.

I've been digging for a couple years now, and yes I agree, since it boomed there's really been less and less meaningful diggs out there. But occasionally you'll find ones that aren't in your RSS aggregators already.

I'm with RightOn, Cooper and LorriM. Me too, me too!

I have no need for digg, and no desire to use it.

It's nice to see that others...RightOn, cooper and estarla feel the same way.

I find this very entertaining seeing there is a place to digg this note at the top :)

Digg

I like Digg but visit less and less, more because the objective seems to be to 'get Dugg' rather than to create or contribute and receive reward if people like it.

This has absolutely no chance of making the Digg homepage, it does stand to reason though if you wish to make it in the top 100 for Digg keeping an eye on Reddit will do wonders for you. I think the main issue here is the crowd knows itself all to well and knows what will make homepage and what won't and nobody wants to submit a story that doesn't make the homepage. So what do you do? You submit pics and other cliche type entries to boost your Digg ego and show that you to can make the homepage.

But like others have said, it won't disappear soley for the amount of traffic it can bring you. It's just sad that I really don't see a way out of this downward spiral.

What's interesting here though Mike (sorry I should've noticed this before) is that you list Techmeme as one of your sources and I've always viewed that as one of the most useless sites around since it generally only caters to the big dogs. It seems you could use a feedreader for TechCrunch and a couple of others to see what the main story of the day is and can pretty much guarantee that it will be on Techmeme. Not saying it doesn't serve a purpose of informing people of what's hot, but like Digg (even more so actually) it is beyond predictable.

This isn't really anything to do with "originality." I know it's all semantics, really, but this is a simple case of Digg being behind the curve, or the Long Tail, or whatever you people are calling it now.

Weren't people complaining a couple years ago how Slashdot was last to the party with stories? Seems the web just follows a cycle.

Weren't people also saying for a while that Digg got the big stories before Slashdot?

Right On quote: "Digg is irrelevant to me... I wouldn't even bat an eye if they fell off the planet tomorrow."

I agree. Except that I love watching Diggnation... I wonder if there could be a Diggnation without Digg.com?

Digg is boring. I get my "social sharing" through forums and full fledged social networks, so I guess I can confirm that in my case Scrivs is right, everything goes in circles. I started out by sharing and being shared about cool things online in forums, and now I'm back to it again.

Digg was somewhat exciting at one point as a promotional tool, but these days there are better, less time consuming alternatives.

Yeah, I've been noticing that also, I think its from everyone creating accounts or even the social media plugins for blog, sending all of the same information to the different websites like digg, reddit, etc.

There is good and bad on digg, as on pretty much any other site, which gives users almost complete control. The problem with digg, is that it seems the more respected people on it leave more and more each day by the droves, because of digg not listening to it's audience.

Alot of people left when the whole HD-DVD fiasco went down, I was actually there when that happened and I participated in it too. A lot of the more respected people left when that happened, A lot of people left when they changed the comment system for the worse, now digg has a even more irritating design layout, favoring ads over usability (more so than they should).

You don't know how many times I have seen a story get like 5,000 diggs, and it will be like "Digg this if you hate the current comment section" or "We need a picture Section!". They don't really listen to their user base anymore, and the main people that used to contribute to digg in either comments or submitting stories, have defected to other websites. And when you lose a valuable piece of community like that, a community based site like that goes down the drain.

I think this site is actually a pretty good one. Good design, good notes, etc.

If tomorrow you guys were to lose community like digg has lost, you probably couldn't survive. These sites are all about community, and either fail or succeed solely based on it.

I'm sure one will receive tonnes of traffic if one's article appears on the front page of Digg, and to appear on the front page of Digg, one needs to either be an A-lister, or have tonnes of fans who would digg the article.

I experimented with (and learned about) Digg not too long ago, but stopped using it because members of a particular forum I was a member of requested for diggs from other members in return for some favour (e.g. a linkback, a review, whatever).

All of a sudden (OK, maybe not so suddenly), appearing on the front page of Digg is something one can "buy" or "exchange" or "manipulate".

And that defeats the very purpose, no?