Digg dug own grave

Alexis Madrigal on what went wrong at Digg: letting publishers, PR hacks and power users rule the roost instead of everyday readers.

The only way to consistently get stuff on the home page was to work at it like a job. ... everyday users were realizing that nothing they submitted ever even had a chance in hell of going to the front page. They weren't empowered netizens visiting from the future, but chumps who were being played by Digg and a bunch of "social-media consultants."

• [royaltrux]

  Do the Digs Dug http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzFAVIkIIGk

• [franko]

  i see what u did there….

• [fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

  Dear ‘crowdsourced’/'participatory’/government 2.0′/etc. digital direct democracy pipe dreamers,

  We would like to bring to your attention the fact that the internet has a brutal, inhuman, and utterly hardened class of SEO-jocky ‘social media consultant’, amoral clickwhores who would sell their own mothers for a .1% conversion rate bump and spend their careers destroying organic communities in order to monetize the social friendscape…

  Now imagine, if you will, that non-pathetic amounts of money were on the table.

  Have a nice day.

• [fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

  Incidentally, I wonder if this news is at all related to the recent(and much bemoaned, primarily by the previously successful link farmers) reddit purge of certain sites seen as excessively spammy?

  • [EH]

    No, it’s related to Digg getting acquired for $500K yesterday when they turned down $200MM from Google years ago..

• [jarmstrong]

  Apparently an artist captured the event in a felt collage, which is available on  etsy.

  • [EH]

    Ugh, glue-gun crap.

• [BarBarSeven]

  So between this & the Facebook IPO is another dot-com bubble slowly deflating?

  • [Nathan Hornby]

    I don’t think we’ll see another bubble, the likes of which we’ve seen before.

    The internet is a very different place to what it used to me, and I’d argue that business’s online aren’t all that different to business offline. Some flourish, some are here today, gone tomorrow and some will probably stick around forever.

    I think that Digg just lost their way.

    iOS took over a little there, excuse the typos.

• [Nathan Hornby]

  I’d actually forgotten that Digg even existed. And I work with the web for a living.

  I’m surprised they managed to sell it all.

• [Joe Witherspoon]

  In fact the same sort of thing is happening with Google in e-commerce. Expert marketeers, bloggers, video-makers and so forth spam Google with 5-6 videos, blogs, product pages, meta tags, nameless Facebook postings about every single product they sell. They get to own the top rankings on any item and smaller businesses lose market share.

  • [EH]

    Smaller businesses can’t come up with 5-6 videos?

  • [stuck411]

    Google does seem to be changing their algorithms to reduce the impact of aggregators and their ilk. I don’t do anything with their e-commerce but in doing research it’s nice not having to start half way down the page to find the ‘real’ information.

    • [Jer_00]

       Google is constantly changing their algorithms to more effectively combat the SEO leeches.  That’s been true since they first went online. 

• [Charles-A Rovira]

  When it got confusing and confused I moved on.

  The click whores who are there now are just noise makers in an echo chamber.

• [elix]

  I haven’t cared about Digg since 09 F9. Sooo… this isn’t surprising to me.

• [Glen Kiltz]

  Although Digg did turn out to be useful more often than not.

• [Kimmo]

  Ring a bell, Boing Boing?

  *cough* Submitterator *cough*