The social bookmarking sites don’t seem to be driven by the people anymore. I’ve been observing this trend for awhile on the popular social bookmarking Digg, as it is one of my frequent visits during any given day. It just seems like Digg has become too inaccessible to the average web publisher. I think most people out there publishing content have long coveted that story on the frontpage and the traffic that comes along with it. Everyone aspires for that Mongol hoard of traffic that acknowledges that the content you created was deemed worthwhile by the masses, at least for a couple of hours, or until the point your server folded like a cheap lawn chair from the strain.

The problem with Digg these days is that the content has almost become homogenized by the larger sites on the web. It’s less about how good your content is then it is how big your network of contacts is. I’ve long tried to take part in the Digg community by submitting content, but this is essentially an exercise in futility. The days of being able to just submit a story to Digg and have it catch on with the users of the site is long gone. Essentially the corporations and larger websites, with their ability and resources to promote their content have taken over the site. Looking at the frontpage right now there are articles by Cracked, BBC, Popular Science, Kotaku, Yahoo, NASA, Sci-Fi Network, USA Today and a few other regional newspaper sites. I would only classify 1 out of the 15 to have been published outside of the mainstream media scope. To me this isn’t the same Digg I signed up for 3 years ago.
I know myself I have written a bunch of what I would have deemed Digg-worthy articles, be they opinion pieces or humour, and none of them have managed to gain much traction on the site. I’ve submitted all sorts of stuff that I’ve encountered on the web that I thought would be surefire winners on Digg, only to have them languish with only a few votes before disappearing into oblivion. I’m sure there are thousands of users just like me who have just become fed up with the whole process and have given up submitting articles.

Digg used to be where I went to find geeky offbeat news and tech stories. While there is still that element, it has greatly been diminished as the site moved toward being more diverse topic wise. Another issue that I’ve noticed pop up is how the site lacks immediacy anymore. It used to be that when something major was happening in the world you would see stories on Digg about it right away. This doesn’t happen very often anymore. They have put so many safeguards in place to keep sites from gaming Digg to get onto the frontpage that they have eliminated one of the things I used to rely on Digg for, having the freshest content aggregated from the web. It’s to the point that I’ve seen many of the items on the frontpage a day or 2 previously on other sites. This to me has kind of killed what made Digg something truly relevant.