Comments on: 2006: The Year That Digg Was a Technology Site

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 04:04:00 +0000

I friend sent me the following E-mail an hour ago:

time for a Digg fork? For some time now, a group of friends have been discussing the fact that Digg seems to be controlled by a professional astroturfers. Stories about Apple and Microsoft make the fp a lot, and FOSS less so. Maybe we should respond by creating a separate service with a completely different URL that just mirrors the FOSS stories there, and stop going to digg itself. We could then have a place to go to read FOSS-related stories, without having to plough through all of the news about proprietary code that is not interesting to us. It would also be a good business model. And, coincidentally, the digg software is FOSS, AFAIK, and so is forkable. I think that FS daily uses it.

I guess FSDaily is already out there, but it's a case of preaching to the converted or the choir and the audience is rather small (I know because I see the effects of front page stories there quite occasionally).

By: Wayne

Wayne — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:09:35 +0000

The recent digg algorithm changes were an attempt at reversing this dumpster effect, where before you might be able to get 50 diggs in 24 hours and almost be guaranteed a front page, now I’ve seen hundreds of diggs on upcoming articles waiting for the “thought police” unseen and unsung moderators…

Honestly I’m surprised you aren’t one of em.

By: richard

richard — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 07:15:35 +0000

I agree, Digg is at best a link farm. They offer nothing new for the surfer. It is full of webmaster’s Digging their own articles to get traffic. With the proliferation of these scripts now on the market, sites like netscape have got it right in just using this type of service as an adjunct to their existing website. When the novelty disappears, so will the service. Hopefully, in the meantime, link farms like Digg and Stumble will disappear quickly unless they re-invent themselves.