3monkeys

One of the reasons I have become somewhat disenchanted with digg is the quality of the content. There have been many theories as to why the quality has dropped. When I pondered this issue and how to analyze it, the first line of attack was to determine who was submitting the majority of articles to digg. Digg allows each and every user to view this information, simply navigate to http://digg.com/topusers and sort by submitted. Below is a screen shot at the time this article was written.

If we consider the numbers, this shows that between the top 8 submitters a total of 23,953 stories have been submitted, of which only 2442 stories have reached the front page of digg. This translates to a 10% success rate, or to look at it another way 9 articles out of every 10 were not interesting enough to make the front page. The problem is not isolated to these users. I’ve noticed over time that other users have employed similar tactics; submitting 50 to 75 stories a day. A quantity of stories that highly suggest that the articles are not being read at all before being submitted.

Only one person enjoys a 100% submission rate. The remaining digg users must do one of two things to be promoted: Submit quality articles, or submit vast quantities of articles in the hope that one gets promoted. If the goal of digg is for users to get their articles promoted, then either method is acceptable. If however, the goal of digg is to promote quality content then only the first method is applicable.

My personal method is to review my RSS feeds, choose stories that I personally am interested in, read them and finally select the handful that are of acceptable quality to submit. There are times where I find an article that is suitable for submission to several sites such as digg, dzone and Netscape, when so I will submit to each of those sites. There are other times that an article is acceptable for one site but others. In that instance, I only submit to the appropriate site. I will admit, as most successful social bookmarkers would, that I have submitted poor content from time to time, but in general I take pride in submitting quality content over quantity.

So where does that leave digg? Limit the number of submissions on a hourly, daily or weekly basis and encourage bookmarkers to read the articles first and reward them for quality submissions. This course of action may have some effect on spam submissions as well. Will digg do this? Perhaps not, if you consider diggs revenue model is based on an advertising stream from page views and ad clicks, it may be monetarily more attractive to have more submissions (and dupes for that matter, but that is another story). But would this really limit the number of page views? Consider that the upcoming queue has thousands of stories at any given time. It is unlikely that any one person will see but a fraction of those stories.It

is not necessarily the upcoming queue that contributes the most to diggs low quality content. The real problem is when the low quality stories reach the front page. Front page articles increase the number of views by ten fold in a very short time. It is at this point that the majority of diggs userbase notice the low quality and complain. digg may want to consider some type of moderation, by either staff or trusted members, of stories before they are actually promoted to the front page.

Digg is certainly suffering from scaling and needs to reconsider strategies to combat its decline in quality while maintaining its revenue model. Being the largest player in User Generated and Controlled Content area of social bookmarking, digg must address this issue. If not, eventually another site will and digg will quickly fall the way of other failed dot coms. The Netscape paid Navigator model may be a step in the right direction, however, the jury is still out and it is obvious that Netscape does not generate nearly the page views or traffic that digg currently enjoys.

3Monkeys

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 18th, 2006 at 12:59 am and is filed under Social Networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.