Why The Digg Button Gets You Buried, Not Dugg

Having a 'submit to Digg' button on your site definitely increases the chances of one of your readers submitting your content to the site. However, while it is generally believed that having a Digg voting button on your site will increase the chances of your content being promoted to the front-page, some recent commentary has made me re-evaluate the situation.

About a month ago, NerdyShirts started selling a Digg t-shirt. Upon learning about this, Gizmodo had some interesting remarks about the shirts. And while ironic, they're absolutely true:

The irony is that most people will have no idea what this shirt means and the other tiny percentage who do probably won't be impressed with its low indicator of popularity.

Furthermore, looking at the situation from a content producer's perspective, the same thing happens when you put the Digg voting widget on every post. Since not every post you write is destined for the Digg front-page (and you're bound to be left with some that fail after getting 2-3 Diggs) an incoming visitor that sees a few low numbers is bound to be discouraged by your content and leave. Mitchell Harper is absolutely right in his recommendations, and I would go even as far as saying that you should reserve the Digg widget only for your most exceptional efforts.

If you want to get your post on Digg then submit it to Digg as usual and get it up to at least 10 diggs before you post the widget on your blog. By doing this you'll encourage more Diggs and will reduce the likeihood of someone coming to your blog, seeing that most of your posts have 0 diggs and then leaving because your blog looks deserted.

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HMTKSteve, April 27, 2007

Also be sure to tell your friends not to Digg every story you submit. Digg calls that "gaming" and will convert those "friendly" diggs into buries!

Tanner Godarzi, April 27, 2007

"Enjoy the post? Here are some more that may interest you.

* Why The Digg Button Gets You Buried, Not Dugg"

hawaiib, April 27, 2007

Cool digg story :) you think that it could give me even more traffic ?

clazh, April 27, 2007

There is a wordpress plugin out there which Displays the DIGG button automatically if the story has been submitted to DIGG. Maybe someone can modify it to use the New API and the DIGG button is shown only when there are more than 10 DIGGs.

Nick, April 28, 2007

You are so right. Maybe it is cool to use it only to posts that already have a big number of votes.

soufulow, April 28, 2007

This strengthen my opinion on Digg: getting attention on digg is more like hitting a lottery, you can only do your best and pray the crowd buys your idea.

How To Spot-er, April 29, 2007

Man, you just had me re-evaluate the button I put into my theme :) I never thought of it from perspective you have just outlined and spent this morning 20 min putting it on my site :) got to go remove it ... thanks for great post

St Augustine Real Estate, April 29, 2007

Very Interesting and thanks for the Information..

Aimee, April 29, 2007

This is a great post... I have been toying with the idea of putting a digg button into my blog, but never really knew if it were a good idea. I can see your point about adding it to very popular posts only. Thanks for the info.

Dean Taplin, April 29, 2007

Totally agree. This is what has put me off putting a digg button on my site. I much prefer using one of the more general Wordpress plugins which allow your audience to submit your posts to one of several popular bookmarking sites.

I like the idea from Clazh though, where the Digg button only gets shown after so many diggs. That might be a good compromise.

Becky, April 30, 2007

Who really gives a rip? Digg is really not about some netroots movement where stories are democratically chosen as being best. It is a social networking site. There are networks of people that digg each other's favorites and bury designated people or stories they don't like.

And they become real snotty in discussing it all on digg about how something can become "worthy of frontpage."

Digg is a great concept if it could ever work. The way it would work much better would be to remove the social networking component. Though I realize that is Web 2.0 blashphemy.

~Becky

The Thinking Blog, April 30, 2007

I guess I need not comment because my points are raised by Becky. Just wanted to thank her!

fredjoiners, April 30, 2007

I can really relate to your comment; "The irony is that most people will have no idea what this [Digg] shirt means and the other tiny percentage who do probably won't be impressed with its low indicator of popularity."

I'm new to blogging and had no idea what a digg-dugg was except an ancient computor game.

To my mind its no use putting just a button on a page with no explanation of what its for or what it does.

The same goes for many other gizzmo's that are used in blogging. To the average Joe; What is del.cio.us? Can I really make a comment live on the web? What is RSS and Atom?

I'm learning but I am making an effort to find out. It seems to me that all the geekee stuff needs to be de-jargonised and more intuative.

I read somewhere recently that the blogosphere is 'peaking' or reaching a plateau in traffic. They womdered where blogging was going next. Well, may I suggest that the above be taken into account. I feel there are millions of more potential bloggers out there who would if they could - understand just what its all about.

Frederick Townes, April 30, 2007

Awesome point Muhammad (and Gizmodo). We actually had this debate dealing with a couple recent client sites and decided against this for that very reason. Glad to see the debate was not in vain.

Mike in Arkansas, May 1, 2007