Does Digg even need a Bury Option?
April 30, 2007 | Comments (5) | Filed under: Traffic
I know, I know, this has basically been the all Digg weekend here, but I wanted to talk a little bit about something I’ve been looking into a lot recently, the Digg Bury option. As many of you already know, one my keys to promoting content from Bookmark Bliss has been great exposure on Digg. While Digg can bring you great traffic for a well written story, it also has a lot of side effects such as really putting a lot of pressure on your web server and bringing in a lot of sometimes angry traffic.
If you’re prepared to deal with both of these issues, however, Digg can introduce your site, product, or commentary to a broad range of readers and can really put your new site on the map. For two of the big Digg stories for us, 10 tools for a web 2.0 color palette and 10 lessons from 300 for Online Business, Digg traffic exponentially improved our exposure and brought us thousands of readers and hundreds of new subscribers.
Basically, Digg is a popularity contest. Depending on the your category, there is a formula for how many votes your submission must receive in order to be considered a popular article. This formula is obviously a closely guarded secret, so an exact method to becoming popular is not known. You can get a feel for roughly what it takes if you spend enough time on the site. For more information on how to reach the front page of Digg, there are literally hundreds of articles such as this one from Pronet Advertising that offer tips and tricks to help you accomplish that goal.
Recently, there has been some controversy at Digg over the option to bury a posted article. Any user on the site can recommend an article to be buried (aka removed) for the following reasons:
- Duplicate Story
- Spam
- Wrong Topic
- Inaccurate
- Lame
Where the controversy comes into play is in the fact that none of these reasons requires any justification, and is completely hidden from the entire community. So, any user can basically bury any other post without any consequences or even the need to justify his reasoning. Potentially, a Bury Brigade could form to intentionally bury articles on a whim.
It is because of this that many regular submitters to Digg are becoming frustrated with the system. Many good articles are disappearing for no reason at all, and many articles that are well liked are vanishing as soon as they reach the front page. At times, it’s enough to make a person want to stop reading or contributing to Digg entirely. I was reading an article from Digg today, in fact, and when I went back to find it an hour later it was completely gone.
Danny at Search Engine Land published a great article on the entire bury issue entitled Digg’s Kevin Rose Fails to Stop the Bury Brigade. In the article he discusses the possibility of malicious users intentionally burying articles for poor reasons and the lack of consequences for doing so by the Digg administrators.
After researching the issues with Digg, and having a few of my own articles buried for no reason at all, I started wondering why Digg even needs a bury option at all. The very nature of their entire system is that people vote for things they like, or simply abstain from voting for things they don’t like. Sure, I would imagine the system can be gamed by friends promoting each others articles or people paying for Diggs, but like the NoFollow attrubute, the Bury option more punishes publishers that are legit instead of stopping spammers.
What has been your experience with Digg and being buried? Some articles I’ve found on Digg, and enjoyed have suddenly disappeared due to bury requests. I think the way things are now, their entire system is flawed and many sites are getting fed up. How much longer can Digg keep it up before their major contributor base starts to go else where?
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Lately I haven’t been visiting Digg. Although when I did visit, almost daily, I was very careful when I opted to Bury something. Something had to be extremely “lame” before I gave it a thumbs down. Mostly, however, I’d Bury something only if I knew it was a duplicate. That being said, a Bury option at some level must exist otherwise the “social” editorial portion becomes unbalanced. If you give people the opportunity to give something a “thumbs up” you must also present the “thumbs down” option. Unfortunately, once a “social editorial” site becomes popular and successful, “gaming” the system one way or the other is certain to follow. Despite Digg’s inherit weaknesses I still like it.
I’m a regular user of Digg and I think I hardly ever buried any stories…
I just skipped the stories that didn’t interest me.
i m waiting for your april month’s stats…