When I first started with Digg a month ago, I was very optimistic about the results I would see. Before I continue, let me tell you a little about how Digg works. You submit a story and then you send a Shout (a notification) to all your friends. They then go to the site, read the article, and then vote for it. The more votes you get, the higher in the pages your submission climbs, thus the more people will see it. When someone sends you a Shout, you respond in kind. This is how it’s supposed to work.I joined Digg and after a Digg exchange, I quickly got 119 friends. For the first week or so, things were fine, I received the Shouts and people responded to mine. Then, things started getting out of control. I would log into my email and be astonished to see 80 or more Shouts. I would eventually get through those and then find 20 new ones. It soon became overwhelming.
However, this was not the problem; the problem was that out of my 119 friends, only about 25 of them were actually responding to my Shouts. Here I am spending hours trying to be a good friend, only to find out that the vast majority of them are just deleting my Shouts. The other problem I found, was that the average length of visit to my site lasted less than 5 seconds, basically long enough to find the Digg button and click it.
Tomorrow: Part-Two
See also...
I've Dugg my Last Digg:Part-2
Not only that, it takes several clicks to even get to the Digg Home Page to submit the digg. You have to be logged in to Digg to digg a post, so if you are just merrily reading a post and want to digg it, it's very complicated to do so. I agree, Digg is more trouble than it is worth.
ReplyDeleteI've gotten some regular readers from it, so as of right now, I'm pretty happy with Digg. But what you need to do, is go through and unfriend those who continually ignore you. That way they can't send you shouts. Also, keep the number manageable. Let people be your fans. Fans are great. No shouts, and if you see they are helping you, you can always friend them later. Yeah, it's some work, but since joining Digg, my daily numbers have regularly doubled and then some days, as much as 4 times what it had been. To me, it's like entrecard. Lots of droppers who just visit for 3 seconds, but some do develop into friends and readers.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to Digg and shouts, I only shout articles or pages that are above and beyond good.
ReplyDeleteI only respond to shouts that interest me. This system keeps my time investment at Digg low while still keeping me involved. If a shout is obviously spam, I delete it. If you still want to use Digg in the way I am, you can add me (Digg name same of Blogger name).
(Dead link removed. Comment originally made on...July 16, 2008 11:14 AM)