The Fall of Digg
- 12
- by Antonio Lupetti
- December 29, 2010
It’s strange to see again, after so long, Kevin Rose’s smiling face on BusinessWeek’s cover dated August 2006 on which stands the title “How this kid made $ 60 million in 18 months.”
It dates back to the golden age of Digg, when the site founded by Kevin Rose in December 2004 drew the crowds because of the success achieved during that period of time. Just over four years have passed since that moment during which Digg has lost much of its appeal and a large chunk of users. The bleeding of visits has worsened in the last part of the year confirming an alarming negative trend. In April 2010, a Guardian article reported that the site founded by Kevin Rose had lost, just in a month, more than 35% of traffic (returning to the levels of June 2008) and cut 10% of its staff. A further downsizing of staff by 37% was announced in October on TechCrunch as a clear sign of deteriorating health of the popular news sharing site.
The release of the new Digg version has helped bury the timid enthusiasm of those who hoped for a miracle. The result of the redesign (not only in terms of graphics but also of features) has been disastrous and has sparked numerous controversies and criticisms that have not benefited the image of the site.
The question is, why today Digg is attracting fewer users than some time ago? Beyond any possible speculation about how the site has been managed in recent years, if you look at the page that explains what is Digg, you find this short sentence “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web”. This sentence in its simplicity contains the deep problem of Digg. Many users have delegated Twitter and Facebook to discover and share contents across the web, two services whose usage is now well established in the “digital transposition” of the life of everyone.
Digg is something that users perceive less immediate than Twitter and less personal and intimate than Facebook. Just that feeling is what leads them to believe its use superfluous. Perhaps the downward turn of Digg has not yet reached the point of no return but, probably, the future that awaits the site has all the bitter taste of disappointment.
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Hahah, the new digg is ugly and doesn’t deliver on anything. Sure you can get to the front page, but what if there is no one left to click your link?
Kevin Rose = smug pussy. End of story.
Twitter and facebook didn’t kill digg. Twitter AND facebook are both growing right now. So does that mean they are taking users away from other stuff? Not necessarily. Reddit is thriving right now.
To explain why Digg is dying is really simple. They stopped listening to their users.
They could have added email notifications and on-site reply notifications YEARS ago, but they were merely 3 years too late. What better way to raise pageviews and user time-on-site than encouraging user dialog?
Instead they made things like the diggbar. Remember digg lab apps? Those visualization tools that showed ways in which stories were being dugg? They are completely useless to the end user and a waste of money and time.
Whoever was making the decisions had a lot of money to work with and blew it.
Sometimes I wonder what level of incompetence is truly out there.
fantasysp.com is my startup. It makes setting fantasy sports lineups and tracking players easier. Give me a try. :)
Yes, in part I agree with you. I wrote “Beyond any possible speculation about how the site has been managed in recent years…”. I think what you say it’s a cause, but not the main one.
In germany we have The Same way with Yigg.de. Its a Digg Forecaster ?
Oh the irony of having a ‘Digg This’ link on a story about the downfall of Digg (at least on the RSS feed anyway). *reams of laughter*.
Damn, I really should cut back on sarcasm.
On a more serious note, I have not used Digg for years and years. Never really did use it when I was using it. Seems to be a trend amongst those social sites that grew alot in a short space of time in the mid 00′s. Will we see similiar trends in 2012, 2013 and 2014 about “The downfall of Twitter” or “The fall and fall of Facebook” ??
I think your argument withers under scrutiny. Digg’s old audience has not replaced their Digg experience with Twitter or Facebook, they have either moved to Reddit, or other similar sites, or simply don’t want a Digg-like service anymore. They may use Twitter and Facebook as well, but not for the same reason they used Digg. You appear to be under the false assumption that since Digg lost traffic and Twitter and Facebook gained traffic, then Digg’s loss was Twitter’s and Facebook’s gain, ignore the fact that, despite your claim, you cannot get a Digg-like experience on Twitter or Facebook. If the volume of mail delivered by the United States Postal Service goes down, and the volume of packages delivered by Fedex goes up, it does not follow that the mail is now being delivered by Fedex. Correlation is not causation.
I abandoned Digg about three years ago because it just wasn’t enjoyable any more. The software was flawed, the experience was becoming insufferable, and the hubris of Digg’s management was palpable. You made you mistake right here: “Beyond any possible speculation about how the site has been managed in recent years” then you decide to pull an argument out of thin air and say that Twitter and Facebook are the real reasons for Digg’s downfall, and not the mismanagement that you ignored right from the beginning. Digg thought that they were too big to fail, and bough into their own PR. In the process they were lethargic in respond to their user’s feedback, and they failed.
I’ll chime in with the rest of the comments – to think that Twitter and Facebook killed Digg is is incorrect – neither of those are in competition with Digg. The real killer was as everyone else mentioned, Digg’s failure to listen to their own community and even moreso, doing exactly the opposite of what made them popular. As soon as the front page was filled with paid listings, everyone abandoned ship and went to Reddit.
And now it’s Reddit’s to lose. But so far, Reddit has been doing an amazing job at listening to their users.
I was a very enthusiastic user of Digg, but after the release of Digg V4. I totally stopped using it and many friends in my network have ignored it too.
The fall of Digg, compete ranking proves it very well:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/
I wonder if it might be something much simpler– I stopped using digg because I got tired of all the negativity in the comments. It started becoming drama about which articles were dugg, about which groups were affecting what, and every other possible debate from Jesus to Mac’s vs PC’s. Who wants that every day?
I just got sick of it and went to delicious and rss feeds for content. I imagine many people may have felt the same way.
Personally, I used to go to digg a few times a day becuase I could see cool and interesting news, announcements, or just viral stuff. Then I could see what people thought about it.
I haven’t been there for probably 3-4 months. Last time I went, the stuff on the front page looked like a bunch of paid story placements. Sure they might have been actual stories, but for example, several front page stories were from totalprosports, posted by totalprosports.
It was no longer what the masses thought was cool. It seemed it was more what the companies wanted you to see.
As you noted, Digg lost even more users upon its redesign! Until recently I haven’t been able to use Firefox to Digg content whereas it was fine before the redesign. Aaahhh…