Digg: Love it or Hate It?

Digg is a website that employs a social voting system to promote links toward and away from its front page. Users of Digg can vote for a submission by "Digging" it or vote to hide it from view by "Burying" it. The most Dugg links are considered "popular" and are featured on or near Digg's front page. Links featured on the front page of Digg receive a great deal of traffic from Digg users and often become viral, spreading to other communities through reposting. Links that receive few Diggs get at most a handful of clickthroughs from users.

Praise for Digg

Fans of Digg praise the social news site's sense of community among avid users. Digg has also been lauded for delivering a high volume of breaking news and other quality content each day. The comment sections below each story are also popular with Diggers for their irreverent and punny sense of humor as well as the frequent addition of pertinent information to a story through comments. Some marketers and online content producers like Digg primarily because of its traffic generation potential.

Criticism of Digg

Digg has been widely criticized due to the power held by a select group of elite users sometimes called "power users." According to some sources, 25% of the links on Digg's front page are submitted by a niche group of twenty individual users. Current and former power users acknowledge that, in order to gain traction on Digg and encourage users to Digg your submissions, friendship with a large group of other Diggers is critical.

Critics of Digg also point out that headlines are frequently sensationalized and Digg has been used to spread false or misleading information in the past. Digg's administrators do occasionally step in when circumstances warrant an intervention, but for the most part the site is moderated solely by its users.

Conservative political activists have from time to time objected to Digg's apparent left-leaning bias.

Should You Digg?

If you're looking for an easy tool to improve the SEO value of your articles, Digg isn't it. Digg now applies the "nofollow" attribute to links it deems untrustworthy. That means those links submitted by less popular or newer accounts as well as links that receive few Diggs or many Buries. Therefore, unless you're submitting popular content consistently, there's no SEO value to submitting your articles to Digg. If you are putting the time in to Digg and submit popular content, you're getting much more value than you'd get from a simple inbound link, anyway. So, the use of Digg for SEO just plain doesn't make sense.

Furthermore, it's ineffective and considered spam to use any social community as a traffic generation service. At most, a post that isn't relevant to the Digg community and isn't submitted by an active, well-liked user will send a small handful of pageviews--far fewer than you'd get from just improving your use of keywords and topic choices, or from building a Twitter stream followed by people who are genuinely interested in the topics you choose.

But I Love Digg!

Fantastic! If you're participating authentically and having a great time doing it, then, yes, you should Digg. If you'd be spending just as much time on Digg even if you had nothing to promote there, you've found the right community and your best work will likely be well-liked by Digg users.

Remember, submit only your best writing that's genuinely relevant to the interests of Diggers. Spend some time getting to know what's popular and how you can add extra value by putting an original spin on the topic. Perhaps you have unique credentials that make you capable of providing a behind-the-scenes analysis of an interesting political change or you can interview a key figure in a news story that's caught the attention of the Digg community.

On the other hand, if that type of content isn't what you want to write, there's no reason to force it. You can't guarantee that anything will be popular on Digg, no matter how well-written, unique and interesting it is. It's perfectly fine to enjoy the site just for fun, and consider submitting your own work later if you happen to write something that's well suited to Digg!