But frankly, If I had 300 million, Digg would be about the very last property I would think of buying.

Your article hit several of the high points about why I think Digg is useless, unfair, needlessly discriminatory and a drag on the web in general.

It does excel at one thing … it gives the script kiddes and other basement boys with no life a place to hang out and be rude to people … better, perhaps to shunt them off to a non-influential “holding cell”, else they might spread their snarkiness everywhere.

Digg is openly hostile to new ideas and in particular openly hostile to many bloggers. It is the antithesis of democratic, it is the personal kingdom of Mr. Rose and his minions … if they sell, I wish them the joy of it, and good ridance.

And for those who ever got any traffic from Digg? Bet it was worth nothing. On some of my blogs I use a Socialize bookmark plugin. I’ve edited Digg out of the selections and I’ve thought seriously of blocking Digg referals completely… the people who surf from Digg are not my type of audience.

Not bitter, just very un-enthused with exclusive “boys” clubs and preppy fraternal orders in general.

i think it needs to be reconstructed!
i don’t wanna see a “Drama of Titanic” again

digg is on it’s way out because (as was mentioned in this excellent post only in passing: marketers got a hold of it).

even with the autobury…nothing can be done.

digg dug it’s own grave.

I was never a big fan of Digg and most probably will never be. Everything is TOO much about Digg – too many nasty comments, too much useless traffic, too many low quality articles featured on the front page, too much control, and too much ego.

Digg will be more prone to a nose dive than other sites in the top 100, simply because its focus are the web savvy. This group of users are turning more and more to Firefox. The problem is, when they use FF, they’re no longer using the Alexa toolbar, which is the only thing Alexa can use to monitor traffic. That’s why I reckon the traffic slump is maybe more unreliable than for the average site.

Very good insights into the reason for the sale.

I dugg it!

I think that another problem is the increase in competition. Everyone is getting into the web 2.0 game and the competition for our attention is growing. In fact, the number of social bookmarking, social networking sites, etc. is just plain to difficult to keep up with.

I agree with you 100% that focusing on quality content will pay more on the long run, that way you won’t be dependent on external websites.

Thanks for the insight. It’s nice to understand some of the ins and outs – like the autobury thing. Never knew that existed.

The other thing I started to see happen was certain blogs would have EVERY article hit the front page even when it was pretty junky stuff. I guess they just had a few of the “right” friends.

Oh well. I’m officially over it I think

Although the traffic seems to be of bad quality, many still enjoy the come-and-go Digg effect. The skills of leveraging will be put to test when you get a windfall of traffic like this.

Anyway, we shall just see what will happen to Digg for 2008.

The fact that Digg doesn’t show who buries a story is huge because there’s no accountability. Just in the last day I’ve seen two good stories get buried for no good reason, and with no explanation.

Finally, I think it’s better to simply build good content and get the readers to come back. This blog is a great example… the daily articles are always interesting, and this is one of the very few blogs that I read religiously. (Good job, Daniel!)

I also don’t think that the real figures are as bad as they look in the graph, we all know that Alexa ain’t 100% reliable.

But for a site in top 100 I think they should at least serve as an indicator.

However, I would question the extent of the Alexa drop. Maybe the nose-dive, is down to an increase in the use of Firefox among social site users?