Monday Quick Tip: Watch out for the Digg Elitist

Posted 4/28/08 - Kellex

As many of you know, we ran a post on Saturday called “A Blogger is Like…” which we thought was a great idea to get some involvement on the blog and shell out some links to participants. Well, the post started out great and we saw immediate reactions from people so we threw it up on Digg to see how it would do. Sure enough, it took off and within the first couple of hours was Dugg over 40 times, so we shouted it to friends and the thing started growing even more. (Stumble Upon too, which was actually an added bonus.) Before long we had a ton of comments that we added to the post, we shelled out some links and then Sunday arrived.

I woke up after a night full of IPA’s and noticed it was up to around 80 Diggs and wasn’t really growing anymore. I thought, “Oh well, if it doesn’t make the front page it was still a lot of fun!” However, once I looked at the comments on the actual Digg thread, I saw a comment from another user.

“Someone trying to make a buck by getting Dugg. Buried as blogspam.” -Rotzooi

In other words, we were crashed by a Digg elitist. You know what I mean by that? You know the guy that doesn’t actually have a blog or any of his own work, but thinks he’s really special because he’s Dugg over 1500 stories. After all, he can tell quality because he reads Digg all the time!

So instead of this reaching the main page of Digg and growing our participation and everyone having a ton of fun with this post, it was buried as “blogspam.” I love internet/Digg elitists that can destroy another person’s work by a couple of clicks of their mouse. It’d be one thing if these types had their own blogs or websites with quality content so we could at least give them a little credit as a critic or understand if they didn’t like our work, but for someone to shoot down a piece like this just because it is from a blogger is absurd.

The tip of the day…don’t rely on Digg…EVER. You should always work on building long term traffic rather than making the front page of a social networking site to get a quick blast of visitors.

And of course, this is going on Digg. (I guess I’ll just hope they don’t “John Chow” us and ban us for life!)