Why Does Digg Have Additional Cats When All The Posts Just Get Buried?

February 10th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

Digg has been criticized recently for having a small group of extremely active users who exert a significant amount of influence over which submissions get onto the digg homepage. I was skimming through each of Digg’s categories today to see which articles were making the homepage, and I noticed a disturbing pattern. Only articles from the Technology, Gaming and Video categories seemed to be making the homepage and nearly all posts in other categories get buried.

It made me think, why does Digg bother having additional categories when all that happens is those posts get buried by the Digg mafia?

At first I thought the problem was that nobody was submitting articles to the other categories, but I saw that there were hundreds in the upcoming lists. So, I realised that what is happening is that the top diggers are basically burying anything that pops up on the homepage that they don’t like i.e. almost anything that’s not tech or gaming related.

Digg launched new Science, World&Business, Sports and Entertainment categories in the summer to ‘widen it’s appeal’, but the strategy seems to be failing as stories in these categories rarely make it past the Digg mafia. For instance at the time of making this post:

  • The last Science story to become popular only had 151 diggs and only 6 had become popular in the last 8 hours, with a maximum of 999 diggs
  • Only one World & Business story had become popular within the last 2.5 hours, and only 8 in the last 8 hours with a maximum of 683 diggs
  • One Sports story had just become popular as I was writing this sentence, and by the time I had finished it had already been buried leaving no sports stories making it to ‘popular’ within the last 24 hours

Compare this with the Tech and Gaming channels:

  • 22 Tech stories popular in the last 8 hours
  • 11 Gaming stories popular in the last 8 hours

Now I know that Digg is first and foremost a tech&gaming community, but what’s the point of having other categories and encouraging users who are interested in those categories to submit stories, if Digg’s core powerbase are only going to bury them once they hit the homepage? It tried to neuter the influence of the Digg mafia this week by removing the Top Diggers list, but this quick fix doesn’t appear to be working.

Digg still has plenty of potential, but I just can’t help constantly feeling that rather than making progress, Digg is becoming less and less exciting by the week because old flaws aren’t being fixed and new ones are constantly arising.

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About the Author

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Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

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There Are 4 Responses So Far. »

  1. #1

    Comment by Thilak on 10 February 2007:

    I think most Diggers are Tech followers, so they digg only those articles and that’s the reason for their dominance

  2. #2

    Comment by Everton on 10 February 2007:

    but that’s my point - what’s the point of adding addit cats if the tech diggers just bury everything non-tech??!!

  3. #3

    Comment by Charbarred on 10 February 2007:

    From my experience diggers religiously bury stories from categories such as entertainment. As a result many good sites get banned from the system.
    I personally stopped submitting any stories that are not tech related…after all there are other social news networks that welcome non wii-apple related news.

  4. #4

    Pingback by Why The Digg Mafia Will Cost Kevin Rose Millions! » Techtites on 17 February 2007:

    [...] My belief is that Digg is pretty close to reaching saturation of its potential market, and the actions of the Digg Mafia are making it hard for Digg to attract new active users. In fact, the Digg mafia are probably driving existing users away. Even the introduction of new categories seems to have failed due to few submissions being made to these categories and also because the Digg mafia tend to bury these stories. [...]

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