Less Than 20% Of Digg’s Users Are Active
I was having a quick look around the new Version 3 of Digg which launched earlier today and I noticed something in my profile which I hadn’t spotted before, my rank. Given that Digg now has in excess of a million users I was shocked to see that I was ranked around 6,500, especially as I wouldn’t say that I’m a prolific submitter or digger.
I remember reading a few stories last week by Digg users complaining about how the majority of digg users were just reading articles and weren’t fully participating in Digg, so I thought I’d follow the links through to see how many active users Digg really has.
By following the links through I eventually landed on the last page of ‘active’ users showing that only 200K of Diggs users had actually submitted or even dugg an article (and the tail is very, very long…..)
At first I thought this was amazing and then I realised that because of the way Digg works, there isn’t really a reason for the average user to Digg an article. In my view Digg is basically controlled by a small vocal and active group of users who decide which articles get promoted to the homepage, or get flared never to be seen again.
Once these users have decided what gets promoted to the homepage, what happens from then on in doesn’t really matter at the moment. There’s no incentive for the average user to digg an article that’s already made it to the homepage. An article only gets promoted for a set time period so whether it subsequently receives 10, 100 or a 1000 diggs doesn’t really matter.
I think this is why a lot of the digg ‘voyeurs’ aren’t getting involved with helping to sift through the sheer volume of articles that Diggs gets.
If I was running Digg, I would probably introduce a new rating element for articles that have actually made it onto the homepage, where users could rate an article between say 1-10, and each article would show it’s running average, rather than only offering two options; to digg or not to digg. At least users who only visit the homepage can get a better view of whether an article is good rather than just the sheer volume of diggs.
I just feel that showing that an article has X thousands of Diggs once it is on the homepage is pointless, as the key value to me of Digg is that there are sufficient users who are passionate about controlling digg’s overall quality, who ‘police’ submissions and decide what gets on the homepage.
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