The imminent implossion of Digg
For the astronomy buffs out there, it seems as if Digg in its red giant phase of life. It has enjoyed a quick rise to the top of the media world, garning attention from the elite print media as well as the online universe. While it may have not yet quite peaked, it has certainly come close and that means that it will soon slowly implode on itself and die away.
Digg has been quite the success story for Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson and I applaud them for what they have accomplished. Taking a couple grand, an idea and building something that is worth tens of millions in a few short years is quite an accomplishment.
With all of the recent problems that Digg is having they are destined for doom. Yea yea you could say that it is just growing pains or some other BS but everyone has got to see that Digg has become a monster that I doubt Kevin or Jay had envisioned.
There are two factors leading to Digg’s downfall. The first is that their voting system obviously isn’t democratic. Not every submission is equal to the next when it comes to items getting front page and probably not every vote is equal either. A user’s ranking seems to favor heavily in the equation and that has been Digg’s single biggest mistake. It has lead to high ranking users getting paid to submit stories and to vote.
Their second problem is the commenting of users has become decidedly unsocial. Go through any of the comments on a front page article and you will see that there is little intelligence or logic involved in the ‘discussions’. Coming from a community that is largely technical, this is a real shame and does a real injustice to us all.
Before it all comes down on them, I hope that the financial backers of Digg don’t get too greedy and hold out for too much money so Kevin and Jay get to cash in while Digg still has some value to a large corporation such as News Corp.
The rate at which Digg is losing credibility is increasing rather quickly with the community and as such its implosion is not that far off.
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Comments
[...] I recently wrote about the imminent implosion of Digg which was focused on Digg failing at the user level, but Digg could also fail by not making any money. As a recent article on TechCrunch shows, they are getting more funding to keep them afloat because they are not cash flow positive yet. [...]
digg is a smart looking idea gone really bad. You can see very lousy news getting digged by zealots and important things not even appear. it is a Hype-Fud machine of linux-mac freaks. i now rarely check it.