Digg: Is it Worth Your Time?

Nov 14, 2008 by Matt | Posted in Social Media 3 Comments

Many bloggers invest a lot of time and effort in trying to get their work posted and promoted to the front page of Digg, hoping for a huge surge in traffic and instant fame.

But really, is it worth it?

Most of you have probably already learned that it’s hard to get Dugg. It doesn’t happen very often, unless you’re one of the few sites that seem to be perpetually on the front page, and you’re better off just focusing on your website, and hoping it will happen some day on it’s own.

Do you want to get Dugg though? Sure, it’s a nice ego boost, and you may get a few subscribers out of it, but studies have shown that Digg traffic is of very low quality. You get people just looking for some quick entertainment. You won’t gain many subscribers, you likely won’t have any comments (or intelligent comments anyway) added, any ads you have will likely be ignored or blocked entirely, and the sudden rush of traffic will fade away in hours. Fun, but it will cost you in bandwidth, with little return, save for some impressive statistics.

Also, Digg is full of jerks. It seems that the place has been devolving into a wasteland full of trolls. Comment threads turn into flame wars pretty quick over there. All of the Apple-bashing especially has been getting on my nerves. Users clinging to outdated myths, sketchy claims, and lame recycled arguments loudly slam Apple, and bury comments with some sense or facts to them. If you don’t like Apple, go into your preferences and turn the “Apple” category off instead of ruining the site for the rest of us.

I just haven’t been very happy with Digg lately. I’ve never seen one of my posts get more than 80 Diggs (not enough to make it out of Upcoming), my inbox gets flooded with “Shouts” that vary wildly in quality, and the quality of the Popular section’s entries just isn’t up to snuff these days. (Not to mention the rampant trolling in the comments!) I spend too much time reading and voting on other people’s submissions when I could be doing something more productive.

What’s your take on the current state of Digg? Is it worth visiting at all anymore? I’m real close to sticking to my RSS feeds for news, and Reddit and StumbleUpon for what Digg used to be for…finding new and interesting stuff.

  • http://www.8164.org Jin

    I like stumbleupon much better. It tends to draw audiences who are actually interested in your content, rather than just passing by. Also, stumbleupon generates more steady traffic in the long run too. Digg is for instant explosion.just my $0.02.

  • http://www.vladan.fr Vladan

    Also,with shared hosting you’ll have hard time to survive. Under heavy traffic your website can became unreachable, and as it happened to me a few months ago, your hoster will deactivate your account, because of High CPU utilisation (over 60%). So I prefer organic traffic, which is less demanding…

  • http://www.webmaster-source.com Matt

    @Jin, A lot of bloggers think that, including myself. If someone Digg’s me, I don’t mind, but StumbleUpon is better quality traffic, and lasting traffic, so I tend to prefer it.

    @Vladen I know what you mean. I haven’t had my shared account shut down yet, but I believe I’ve come close. I had a huge StumbleUpon spike awhile back, with my “Don’t Block Firefox” post that really touched a nerve with a lot of people, and was timely enough. And anyway, I’ve seen plenty of shared hosting setups taken down by Digg. :)