Digg is Dead!!!!
 

Alas, the run is over. And it's not coming back.

According to the latest Compete.com data (April, 2010) Digg lost an astounding 13.8 million unique visits from March to April, 2010 -- a near 36 percent drop. Apparently sensing impending doom, Digg founder Kevin Rose has made several announcements of retooling Digg, but nothing has materialized. In fact, the announcements might have been the worst thing Digg founder Kevin Rose could have done. It's been over a year since Rose announced that changes would come. In the mean time, Facebook and Twitter have soared and it appears the Digg crowd grew tired of waiting. While the changes seem to be close to a reality now, it's too late.

A recently released video demonstrates what will change with the new Digg. And, by all accounts, it's another social network. An unnecessary one. The main focus is to make friends (starting by importing your social graph from sites like Facebook) and Digg stories. Then, your new Digg page will show the stories Dugg most by all your friends. Sound like something your friends "liked" on Facebook? Or perhaps something retweeted on Twitter?

The biggest problem with Digg in the past was that unless you devoted serious time to it and knew how to work the system, you had little hope of ever making the front page. The only stories that made the front page were typically those voted up by voting blocs; networks of like-minded individuals attempting to send streams of traffic to each others' sites no matter the content of the story. And if you didn't make the front page, the benefits were very little, if any. Now, you still will need to dedicate serious time to the site -- only this time you won't receive near the level of exposure. That is, unless your "friends" vote up your stories at a breakneck pace. Which, for all intents and purposes, puts us right back where we started with Digg. In other words, there's no innovation here and the real value proposition of Digg hasn't changedm, it's just become more labor intensive.

In the soon-to-be end, Digg will become known as the first network to die from social fatigue. Facebook and Twitter are booming, LinkedIn is holding steady and even MySpace seems to have settled into a niche. But Digg is in a deadly, unrecoverable tail spin. The fact is, people -- real people -- are beginning to tire. Submit this, upload that, vote on this, "like" that, be my "friend", check in here, suggest this, retweet that ... there's already so much to do. The only thing left to "Digg" is a grave.



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Online entropy hard at work. :upsidedow

im glad digg is going down. i hate that site with a passion. errors all over the damn site got annoying fast

Reddit > Digg

Don't know about that line. Haven't run the #s but friendster is pretty fucking dead. Also w/ digg I think of it more as social media over social networking. If you consider rating / ranking sites in the mix of social media big traffic generators like Face the Jury etc died out long ago. Then there's livejournal... Digg is not the first. :2 cents:

I know this will come, Digg is so hard to compete with bot voters, normal people don't have a chance

Well,most of digg users are webmasters and paid diggers so once they make a nofollow links that caused drop in popularity.

Plus they just let go of some staff.

Word. Reddit keeps it real simple. Digg keeps it real stupid.

Nice wordplay.

Digg is too slow. By the time a breaking story hits the top it is old news...

I've been saying Digg would fall hard for many years... to me it was quite obvious...

They started falling apart when the top 10 Digg'ers were responsible for virtually all of the front page content... The owner was touting how it was a free service and how it would be immune to all the marketing people posting what they wanted on the front page because it would all be dugg by individuals... He forgot there are other ways for capitalism to sneak its way into anything that can be profitable.

FACEBOOK and Twitter are sucking most of the traffic of every site... including adult...

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Twitter and Facebook ate Digg up. It's too "clubby" and L337 for regular joes so they went elsewhere.

I read an interview with Kevin Rose a year or so ago where he mentioned this as the biggest problem they faced, guess they never worked out a solution for it.

I used to like Digg, comments were comedy a lot of times.

It's overall Alexa rank is 121 and US is 55.

It's dead.

So true so true

Digg was just way to hard to work with. Like others have said. Even in the early days, It becomes a full time job for our whole office just to try and keep stuff on the front page. We gave up! There are alot bigger organisations out there that can maniuplate digg better than us.

I think digg should also have tons of sub categories like dmoz directory have,having few main categories doesn't have much sense.

Damn. Dat's brutal foo.

A lot of people seem to have a love/hate with that site for whatever reason(s).

Trying to submit anything was a headache.. sometimes it worked, most times I didn't get passed the login page. Like I said, site errors.

digg has been going downhill, i regularly visit reddit now to get my fix