There are 7 diggs in the past 17 days, then one from 2/8, then at least 6 more that are within the last 30 days.
And comparing to Twitter actions is dumb. The real(ish) story would be if there's been a precipitous drop in his Digging. Maybe it's been a long time since he Digged a lot because he's gotten so busy. Or maybe he's never Digged all that much and he's more of a lurker.
I'll leave figuring out if there has been a precipitous drop as an exercise for someone who cares about Digg.
What is with that bar graph? Who thought 'I'm sure our readers can't comprehend the difference between '181' and '7', so we'd better put it on a graph'?
Frankly I'm just amazed whenever I see a graph online where somebody hasn't diddled the y axis, or a 3d pie graph with massive chin that 'accidentally' makes the lower slices look much more massive than the top slices.
Maybe he'd blame that on the default styling of pie charts in Keynote (tsk!), but it'd take some extraordinary reality distortion to believe the Apple slice landed at the bottom by accident.
When was the last time Chad Hurley used his YouTube account to do something? How often do you think Zuck is on Facebook?
This is truly absurd. I don't often try to rain down insults at TechCrunch, but this is over the edge.
Everything from the SEO-ified headline, to the factually incorrect content, to the intellectually insulting bar graph, to finally the fact that there really isn't even a story here even if the claims might be true...is just annoying. This is over the edge.
The key point in the article is that he's not so busy that he doesn't use Twitter all the time. I think your point would be more valid if Hurley or Zuckerberg were using another service 10 to 1 over their own.
I absolutely agree. However, to be honest, I didn't realize it until I read your comment. Maybe it's because I am still working on my morning coffee, but I read the TC post, thought "bummer for Digg", and moved on.
This is what makes a site like HN so great. Crowd-sourcing news analysis provides for such a better experience. I'm still working on my coffee, but I think HN is pointing towards the future of news.
This is so pointless and stupid. Maybe he's caught up in actually developing the site? Or using a staging server with bleeding-edge features that aren't reflecting his production account?
And Digg andTwitter are both brilliant platforms for totally different forms of engagement. If Zuckerberg (@finkd) were to get more active on Flickr or Twitter would one say that Facebook is not a great service anymore?
I don't use twitter for news because I don't care to sift through the 96% of drivel people seem to put up there. But your saying people actually do that?
How do people find good context on twitter? Do they follow people who only post good news type stuff along with their boring friends?
Digg used to be my homepage until I got totally irrelevant to me. I tried reddit for a while and got hooked by the quality of the content about programming and python. The funny and pics sections are cool too.
I can't readily substantiate it because video and audio aren't Google-able but it has been referenced on the show in passing, Alex has mentioned it in an interview on how he schedules TRS, diggnation, etc and I believe Kevin himself mentioned it once when asked about his own schedule at one point. The best I can do is to point you toward Alex's once a month trips to SF:
More like "they build you up, and you tear you down".
The demise of Digg is entirely self-inflicted.
My recollection is that amongst other things they:
Had a big pointless UI change
Arbitrary changes to how something shows up on the front page
Polluted the frontpage with 'sponsored links' (read as: advertising)
Layered ads on their ads ("I heard you like ads...") with a side-helping of ads.
In order to increase click-through they were trying to make the ads look like normal links... this is scammy. Once you start lying to your users, why should they trust you? Once you lose their trust, how will you ever get it back?
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Now I'm not saying advertising is evil, and I'm not saying they shouldn't try to monetize. Gotta put food on the table somehow.
But honestly, I don't believe that they've dropped from 18 million to 12 million. 18 million to 1.8 million, that I'd believe. Digg is like a ghost-town now compared to what it used to be.
I was big into digg for a long time, then I discovered Reddit, which happens to be the exact opposite of every point that you made.
Digg had some cool UI elements and a cool labs subdomain, and as a web dev, that kept me interested. The content and the system as a whole made me move away from it.
Well, I had successfully forgotten the diggbar until you reminded me. :D
To do: add "bleach for the brain" to shopping list.
Honestly I never used it. Presumably there were those who loved it, those who hated it, and those who went 'meh'. I remember it generating a lot of controversy, I just don't remember what it was that it was supposed to do.
That's pretty sad. The worst part is they just mentioned that they sped up the homepage by 75%, which is really irrelevant for a site that isn't technically focused like Google. They're trying to appeal to the wrong crowd.
"For a site that isn't technically focused like Google"
A 400ms improvement in page load time at Yahoo directly increased page views by 12%
Although Digg isn't actually speeding up their page serving, you should note that page speed is one of the cornerstones of conversion rate optimization.
Google will even penalize slower sites in SEO rankings. Page speed is about the easiest way to improve engagement and conversion rate with modern CDNs etc:
I think there may be a bit of confusion here, as the recent post about the increased number of daily stories on Digg's frontpage was written by a Digg user and posted to their blog, not written by Digg staff or otherwise endorsed by us. (I work at Digg.) Our last blog post was yesterday ( http://about.digg.com/blog/how-get-started-digg-filtering-my... ) and about a couple of new features we rolled out.
Your comment seems to imply that they sped up the time it takes to load the homepage by 75%, which is not the case. That figure was a in reference to how frequently a new story hits the homepage.
Well it is the case, just not what's being trumpeted in the latest press release. v4 was supposed to speed up page load significantly, that's why they added the little page load timer at the bottom of the page.
http://digg.com/kevinrose/diggs
There are 7 diggs in the past 17 days, then one from 2/8, then at least 6 more that are within the last 30 days.
And comparing to Twitter actions is dumb. The real(ish) story would be if there's been a precipitous drop in his Digging. Maybe it's been a long time since he Digged a lot because he's gotten so busy. Or maybe he's never Digged all that much and he's more of a lurker.
I'll leave figuring out if there has been a precipitous drop as an exercise for someone who cares about Digg.