The Decline of Digg

By Jordan Kasteler (Utah SEO Pro)

Preface

Let me begin this post by stating I have recently been banned by Digg…on two accounts. One account I have put many hard working hours into and had front paged 45 stories. This is not the reason for this post, I was pissed with Digg far before my ban. This post was incited by Social New Central as a call for action to Diggers and ex-Diggers to voice their opinions and grievances about Digg.com.

Digg’s Decline

Digg is on the decline and I don’t stand alone on this issue. Take a look at their Alexa statistics over the past 6 months:

They are losing viewership rapidly. They are down 59% of visitors in the past 3 months since they started banning people but up 16% of page views.

Digg’s Agenda

It is much speculated that Digg is trying to increase their page views for more ad impressions for their advertisers. Blind Diggers posed a threat to page views by “blind Digging”. Blind Digging is the act of Digging a submission without viewing it and a lot of top users did so to gain support from other Diggers.

Digg recently announced they raised $28.7 million in VC money to upcoming ventures. Then came this post about script banning along with my, and many others, banning script usage. It’s all too coincidental that these things happened back to back.

The Bannings

Is Digg pressured into banning anyone who knows Digg well enough to use scripts to automate increasing Digg authority? I think so, Digg’s been trying to sell for awhile and they can’t sell a site with spammers, marketers, or gamers. They could get their script users to stop with temporary bans or warnings without permanently banning though. That just creates anger and hatred for them.

Digg thinks they are cleaning house by banning people that are blind Digging via scripts.The people likely to be using scripts on Digg are top users. Why ban top users of a site which contribute to almost 50% of the content? Digg acts as if they’re listening to the community who feel it’s unfair to see the same users front page everyday when in fact they are creating a community of hate towards them.

To ban a user for life for blind Digging script usage is a bid absurd. There were no warnings and no communication regarding it. After the initial ban, I stopped using scripts but that was not enough. They wanted to ban people that knew the name of the game. In all honesty, I never knew that using a script would get me in trouble or was against anything. It simply automated a process that took me a couple hours to do daily. I had built my account up manually digging and had only used the script for a couple months. That alone was all it took.

Digg for Social Media Marketing

Digg acted as if they were trying to crack down on people using it for a Social Media Marketing platform but in all reality it’s almost impossible to market on Digg anymore due to them only front paging certain authority sites like Huffington Post and Arstechnica. It’s become less about the content and more about the domain and submitter. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of social news?

The Aftermath

The content on Digg.com after the bannings has gone to hell. The lamest things are front paging and even duplicate stories and have front paged. This is going to cause Digg to lose even more viewership. Banned Digg users have moved on to communities that welcome them like Mixx, and even communities that DON’T welcome them like Reddit.

Since Digg doesn’t listen to it’s most dedicated users, and chooses to get rid of them instead, they will die a slow cold death.

(Update: Deleted childish humor which makes Digg thrive due to the offense of friends.)