Digg Suffers from Being Way Too Good

I love digg.  I watch diggnation religiously. Back in 2005 when I was learning about social media, I farted around digg in such a way that this blog, my blog, Chris Abraham, was banned — and it is banned still in 2009, well after I cleaned up my act (go ahead and try to submit this article to digg, I dare you!)

Says the digg community admin:

Thanks for taking the time to contact us at Digg.com regarding your website. As you know, Digg is a community-driven website — our community has consistently reported the domain to which you refer as spam. Because unblocking your domain would not be in line with the best interests of the larger Digg community, we will not reverse this decision.

I appreciate their respect for their community and I respect the quality of the content, so no complaints.

That said, however, I think digg has become too much of a stickler and has become too structured, exclusive, and restrictive. When enough people feel like their digg or their submissions are meaningless, they’ll go elsewhere — to places such as Facebook and, especially, twitter — environments that are much more self-policing, more forgiving, and less structured.

In its attempt to get it right, I think digg ratched the site too far, limited to a relatively few of the elite.

In Can Digg Keep Up With Facebook, Frederic Lardinois explores the issues surrounding the war between Facebook and digg:

In a way, though, comparing Digg to Facebook isn’t even necessarily fair, as they provide two completely different services, but in terms of the users they want to reach, both have very similar aspirations. For now, Digg, however, hasn’t been able to break into the mainstream (even though Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht made an appearance on Jimmy Fallon last week), while there is a good chance that even your mother is now joining Facebook. If Digg wants to continue its growth, it will have to find a way to attract more mainstream users without alienating its base.

I wonder if digg is alienating mainstream users anyway but being too much of a secret society. Maybe digg does not trust its community enough, that the chaff and the wheat won’t sort themselves out well enough.

I personally don’t care if my blog is ever brought back into the fold, but I do think this corporate shunning might be indicative of something more sinister and more likely to result in digg’s demise (or failure) than Facebook or Twitter or MySpace will, to be sure.

Let me know what you think.

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Tagged as: Alex Albrecht, appearance, aspirations, Blog, Chris Abraham, different services, digg, Digg.com, elite, environments, Facebook, Frederic Lardinois, good chance, Jimmy Fallon, Kevin Rose, mainstream users, stickler, submissions, taking the time, Twitter