Why Digg Is #1

We’ve all done it. We’ve all voted up a link into the thousands. We’ve given our thumbs up to some struggling stories that never quite had that special something to make the front page. It’s heartbreaking, but we did it. We do it. Well, maybe not heartbreaking, but there’s bound to be a few among the millions of visitors who’ve lost a tear or two over an unjustly buried submission. Who’s we? Diggers. And we love playing the role, more so today than ever.

Digg.com was simple back in the day. Of course, when you speak of “back in the day”, there’s usually some horse-drawn carriage imagery that comes to mind. No? Too far back? Ok, how about that time when Apple was still hitting at the x86 world with its near-zealous love-trumpeting for the “almighty” PowerPC G5? That better? Good. Now, where was I? Oh, right, Digg. What a simple idea, huh? Let users run the show and you just renovate the place to make it easier for Diggers to “digg”, and so on and so forth. You wish you thought of it first. So do I. Unfortunately, we’re just spectators to the most famous aggregator of all, but at least we can take part in the sport. That sport is what I want to cover here, because it’s fun to read the stats of page views and whatnot, but sometimes you just have enough of it. Sometimes you want more. Something of substance. You want to know why. That’s what I’m here to give you. At least my take on it anyway.

It started as an experiment. Late in 2004, a group of four: Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetsky, and Jay Adelson – perhaps all of them San Franciscans, I really don’t know – took the proverbial napkin-borne business plan and started “toying around” with the idea of creating a news and content aggregator, only instead of taking it upon themselves to tell the world what they should think is cool, they decided they’d leave it up to ‘the people’ to decide what’s cool or not. In other words, what people dugg. (Here’s a tidbit I gleaned off of Wikipedia. The site’s creators first tossed around the name “Diggnation” as their official tag, a term coined by David Prager, a friend of Rose’s. The title was later hacked into simpler form. ‘Digg’ was born.)

The experiment literally ballooned. Geeks, of course, were the first to be “in the know.” That was natural, as they’re always an eager bunch to beta test new gadgets, gizmos and applications. (It’s no wonder why the apparent majority of software developers now routinely (and freely) offer up works in progress to get valuable feedback. Google practices this as one would gospel. They should just re-release themselves as ‘Beta’ and be done with their omnipresent subtitles. No hate here, though. Me like you, Google.)

After a season or two of steady (some might say slow) growth and relatively frequent updates, they started showing hints of hitting bigger waves. But even then, Digg was solely the love child of techno-savvy and wannabe-techno-savvy readers and posters. It was a rare thing to see Iraq War headlines shoot to the top of the heap.

Digg’s founders and their development team knew that they’d eventually exhaust the rocket fuel they were riding on if they didn’t go cosmopolitan and lose the wonderfully-nerdy-but-ultimately-handicapping homogeneity. There were the grumpies who wrote feverishly on blogs that the move to broaden Digg.com’s scope would be the death knell of the site. I have no doubt that some even defected altogether. But, as Digg’s numbers show today, it’s clear that the decision to up the inclusiveness factor was the smartest thing Rose, Adelson and gang had done since registering the domain.

We The People

Many say it was word-of-mouth that did the trick. And maybe it is true that Kevin Rose spouting the prepared ‘page views’ and ‘unique visitors’ sermon over and over again did have something to do with Digg’s massive growth – which, by the way, continues on course. But there’s something that did not get said enough at the start, at least among the media, the blogosphere, and the countless comment threads bound to, among other things, Digg. It is the line that Digg’s CEO and fellow co-founder make it a point to lead with nowadays. A point that I agree is indeed the real reason why Digg is number one. It goes something like this.

Page views meant traffic. But traffic doesn’t mean everything. Especially traffic that’s continually unique and unworthy of the ‘recycled’ label. The spark that ignited the inferno was everyone’s willingness to sign up. (The usual user name and password mumbo jumbo.) Anyone could view the stories. But to change the story, either by digging it up or digging it down, one had to be part of the Digg community, and it is the now 707,593-strong (and counting) registered user base that was and still is responsible for the welfare of the site. The success of Digg is hinged on people’s desire to “+1” something – and “-1”, too. Because they are not only able to get something out of the site. They are a cog among millions of fellow cogs that keep the machine oiled and the news coming. They were the kindling that made Digg’s first spark into a hotter and hotter flame, and now the fire first set in December of 2004 is burning as bright as ever. Only several dozen hours ago, roughly two years after introducing itself to the world, Digg announced its one-millionth submission. One of many before and many to come that are promising Digg the #1 slot for the foreseeable future.

Don’t count on the honeymoon lasting forever, though, guys. All good things come to an end. But lets at least hope that Digg doesn’t end up memory while Web 2.0’s candle is just starting to really heat things up. I must say, I find it hard to believe anyone’s going to pop this bubble any time soon. Here’s to hoping I haven’t jinxed the king by bringing out a little gloom at the finish line.