Digg Aftermath - The Last 24 Hours Have Been Interesting
I don’t have time to write a proper tip today, so I guess today’s tip is for Digg.com.
Without warning I got onto the Digg homepage for the first time yesterday. I’ve only been running this site for a few months, so I’m still stunned by the ‘Digg effect’. My poor little server only lasted about 3 minutes and even though my host tried everything they could to get me going again, everytime they managed to reboot my site, it just went down again. I think at peak I had around 2000 concurrent users on my poor little server. In the end they’ve temporarily moved me to a better server, for which I’ll be eternally grateful.
I’ll like to apologise to my regular readers who couldn’t access the site, and also to my new readers who I think are still arriving from Digg, although I think my 15 minutes of fame on the Digg homepage are over.
I’ve read in numerous places since I started blogging a few months ago, many people complaining about how Digg’s algorithm for selecting articles, but no-one has written anything about the flaws in the way Digg sends traffic to sites. Yes, it is exciting, but the sudden rush of visitors that Digg sends to sites is ludicrous.
Sending a flood of users to a site all at once isn’t helping anyone, including Digg. All it’s doing is giving a poor experience for Digg users who can’t read the articles that other Digg users thought were interesting. I bet that 50% or more of sites that make the homepage can’t handle being Dugg and the flood of users that Digg sends all at once.
All that Digg is doing is making hosting companies think they’ve hit the jackpot, as more and more sites upgrade their hosting plans in case they get dugg again, or just in case they get dugg in the future. If I owned a hosting company I’d be sending Kevin Rose a big thank you note and a kickback every Christmas.
I work for an ISP and we hate services like P2P and BitTorrent that don’t ‘play fair’ by not shaping their traffic responsibility, or sending it via the most cost-effective route. They basically don’t care about the costs and problems they create for ISPs who have to carry the traffic, and other internet users. I’m putting Digg in the same bracket for site owners, as Digg clearly doesn’t care about small sites like me that don’t have a dedicated server, but who can still write content worthy of the Digg homepage.
Why don’t they rotate the homepage more, so that the huge traffic is shared amongst more sites? Why have ‘newly popular’ as the default listing/main feature on the homepage? All that does is drive the maximum amount of traffic to sites who are probably unaware that they have just hit the digg homepage. It gives sites no time to prepare for the tidal wave that is about to hit them, which will in many cases take their sites down.
It would make much more sense in my view to show the articles with the most diggs over the last 24 hours first, as to have achieved this those sites would have needed to be have been capable of handling digg’s traffic levels. I would then put the ‘newly popular’ articles where the ‘top 10′ articles are now, so that new sites who have just made it onto the homepage get more time to prepare for the ‘digg effect’.
I know this would result in less ‘breaking news’ appearing on the homepage, but in my view it would improve the quality of digg because:
- Weaker homepage articles would receive fewer diggs than they do now
- The stronger articles would get more diggs
- Sites that can handle the ‘digg effect’ would get more traffic, which would give a better experience for digg users
- Sites that can’t handle the ‘digg effect’ would get less traffic, which would make it easier for site owners to keep their sites alive, whilst at the same time giving a better experience for digg users
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