What is Digg?72 Comments
- sockpuppets, on 10/12/2007, -5/+45And digg is like a fleet of USB power dumptrucks, plowing through the front door leaving Wii and ipod carnage in its wake. You're lucky Leah Culver was driving or else I'd of been pissed about it, you meddlin' kids.
- sxtxixtxcxh, on 10/12/2007, -6/+37digg traffic = bandwidth bills
- ZombyWoof78, on 10/12/2007, -5/+35Actually the tubes are used for porn not linking.
- johnham, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22Traffic = Money
If you know the right way to go about it, at least. - digga, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18Yes it was....
DIRECT QUOTE:
How are you going to say that they can't cut a link over? The same link that everyone else cuts on the internet? How do you go to Digg and say a reader has posted this as an interesting link but we don't want that traffic. It's crazy. - guytoronto, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16From the article:
" How do you go to Digg and say a reader has posted this as an interesting link but we don't want that traffic."
Carapi wins the "Didn't RTFA" award today. - merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -8/+23"digg traffic = bandwidth bills"
If you're not making more per page view than it costs to deliver the page, you're doing something wrong. - PecanHead, on 10/12/2007, -6/+19Just write that global warming is only a theory, the Zune is a solid product, and that the Nintendo Wii is not actually God's gift to nerds everywhere. They'll leave your site in a heartbeat.
- uptown, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13Ok ... what's the IP of your webcam?
- jkaiser, on 10/12/2007, -5/+13can anyone say pop-ups? :p
- ZergyPoo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9And mention that Apple sucks and that Steve Jobs is a loser.
- number9ine, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Alternatively, you could just populate your site with uninteresting material. Hey I'm just throwing out ideas here.
- vertinox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Hrm... Why are all the people that say that you should be making ad revenues buried down and the bandwidth bills being marked up?
If that were true that getting a story on Digg was unprofitable, then why do all the Blog Spammers try their best to get front page stories on Digg?
Or maybe they enjoy the mental satisfaction of a large bandwidth bill? - vixenk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Ok, let's assume you have an ad-supported site. What no one seems to be factoring in here is that you pay for a certain amount of bandwidth at least once a month *in advance*... if you want to go the cheaper route you pay a year to two years in advance. If your bandwidth gets eaten up - well, you can upgrade, but that will cost you... cost you the money that you made off the ads that you *don't actually have yet*. It's not like with every hit you get money is being deposited into an account somewhere.
And let's say you upgrade your hosting to accommodate all the traffic out of pocket. Your digg article gets buried - people stop clicking on the link to your site. Now you're left with this expensive bandwidth upgrade that is just a waste of money. Getting dugg once on digg is like one day of fame. The next day you're forgotten again. Now I'm sure in *some* cases people bookmark your site or go back or whatever, but I doubt the majority of people on digg do that.
Now get this - some people don't WANT ads on their sites and *gasp* DON'T ACTUALLY CARE how much traffic they get. Not everyone builds a site for fame and fortune. Some of us actually do it just for a hobby.
Now let's go even deeper... believe it or not, a lot of times a bunch of friends will get together and share a hosting account for multiple websites. If one website eats up all the bandwidth... well, you're going to have some pretty POed friends on your tail that will be expecting you reimburse them for the $$$ they spent on the bandwidth your site just ate up.
My suggestion? Show some courtesy when digging an article. If it looks like a personal/private site and there is no form of encouragement to digg the article (a button or whatever), don't digg it. - evilTak, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7From TFA: "How do you go to Digg and say a reader has posted this as an interesting link but we don't want that traffic. It's crazy."
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5For apache: in .htaccess in base directory:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} digg.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
Anyone ever try anything like this during a "digg effect"? I was wondering if it helped at all. Probably not much but I don't post my websites on digg. - Leiterfluid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"Hmm... I always thought it was from the prefix inter- (between) and network."
It is.
"International" was never part of the original equation. It was a U.S. Department of Defense project, originally. - Trunkmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5A better solution than simply denying the traffic would be to mirror the popular page somewhere that won't drop you (Google Pages?) and use a 301 or 307 redirect just for referrers from digg. Or, if your server can handle the bandwidth but not the CPU, redirect to a static HTML page instead of an off-site mirror.
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Google already does something like this, by reading robots.txt.
It's something that sites like digg and slashdot may want to consider. But really, what good is a site that obeys those rules? - drivingmenuts, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Three reasons I can think of right off the bat:
1) political reasons - perhaps you don't want traffic from Digg because you don't like the site or it's contributors.
2) practical reasons - perhaps you don't care for the Digg effect all that much. Bandwidth is not always unlimited (at least from an HSP's billing POV) and most contributors link directly to the site, rather than the cache. It's not always convenient or possible to switch to an unlimited provider immediately.
3) personal reasons - you don't have to provide an excuse. You just don't. It's that simple. Others may demand an excuse, but there is no law or rule that says you have to give them a reason. - AndrewJC, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6How do you tell Digg you don't want their traffic? Simple: You create a .htaccess file so that any referer coming from Digg.com gets an error page.
The real question, though, is why would you really want to do that? I can certainly understand wanting to turn off dynamic aspects of your page when it gets dugg, so as not to cause undue server load, but why would you actually want to DENY that traffic? - Cytranic, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7""How Do You Tell Digg You Don't Want Their Traffic?""
I think you just did.... - Wolfboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3One reason a local newspaper web site might not want much traffic from Digg is that the Digg traffic most likely is of little value to most of the businesses that advertise on the newspaper's web site.
In other words: Why would "Big Jim's Grocery, Pawn & Used Cars" in East Overshoe, S.C., want to pay to have its ads in "EastOvershoeGazette.com" be shown to people who live more than 50 miles away from East Overshoe? It's not like people from out of town are likely to patronize Big Jim's business.
Meanwhile, the East Overshoe Gazette is getting a big bandwidth bill because its surprisingly well-done and fascinating comparison of the Wii and PS3 got 4,000 diggs... - Arkonnan, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8"How Do You Tell Digg You Don't Want Their Traffic?"
Simple, deny the Digg.com referral url and redirect users to a picture of a gaping anus or mangy dog chewing on its leg. - appy77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Wolfboy,
It's not even that. These days NO ONE likes ads.
People shamelessly go to read content for literally *free* while using AdBlockers and disabling Javascript (which disables AdSense and such)
They don't realize that Ads are what supports the free content they get, but they shamelessly block ads.
It's a pity. - mjjack, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You all need to read this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=1436
It basically says that digg traffic doesn't bring as many benefits as people think it does. Any traffic is not necessarily good traffic. "These users DO NOT click ads. Less than 10% (from our metrics) stay on the site longer than 90 seconds (even if the article would take a normal person 3 minutes to read). Digg, in particular, has brought the lowest rate of RSS subscriptions per visitor group of any link we've ever had - under 1/10th of 1 percent."
So you get all this traffic, but no ad revenue, no subscribers, few repeat visits and few visits to other areas of your site. Is that worth it?? There is benefit in building reputation and linkbacks but I don't think you need a huge amount of traffic to do that. At least not to the point where your bandwidth costs go through the roof. I think the ideal case would be regular articles with a few hundred diggs, rather than the odd one or two with thousands (that bring down your server). - osbjmg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2.htaccess
- Arkonnan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Sorry, paying customers only. ;)
- prockcore, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2He's not a non-technical person. He was one of the first people in the US to put a newspaper online (back in 1995). It was also an ISP (providing dialup, leased T1 lines, and later on, DSL).
- splintax, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Maybe you should stick to the 'videos' section.
- vertinox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@"have you ever heard of adblock or the "don't click on the damn ads" mentality??"
Actually, thats not too hard to work around.
Gamespot.com actually often makes it impossible to read certain stories if you have adblock turn off for the com.com ads. Because they put the background images in the same directory as the ads, your eyes will be hurting trying to read white on white stories. - jonnyq, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3The article sounded like it was written by someone who didn't know a whole heckuva lot about the Internet. (who says "cut a link"?)
And that's a good thing.
This means that even the non-technical folks are starting to get the idea and come to their senses. Yay for the author - crappylinks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1'(who says "cut a link"?) '
Is it possible that "cut a link" is a UK English idiom, as opposed to USA English? This is a UK story. - mabhatter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1no, the author is commenting on the general view of print media publishers that websites are a "hassle" and "why do so many people abuse my site?"
They threw out some really good suggestions. What they did miss was the fact that newspapers, particularly local ones need to establish the contacts to get you to go to them FIRST instead of Yahoo news or Google news. That's how they need to start thinking. After all, Google and Yahoo mostly use bots to read other news sites... there's a huge opportunity there for the Local/regional papers to try to make their sites Better than Google for regional news... it's a tall order, but realize Google doesn't have reporters, they don't have editors.. they don't actually GET the news... the papers do that. - energyblue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think Digg should have a short code that webmasters can throw into their HTML.
Which, when story on site is added, digg can read the site and find the code and disable the story add. - ogEmmet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1http://www.coralcdn.org
Free caching from NYU. They'll cache bigger files (up to 35M) serving up 250G (yes, G) per IP address, per day for free with no ad framing like others. Very, very easy to use. To cache http://digg.com change the address to http://digg.com.nyud.net:8080 . It's not perfect but it will survive the worst digg can dish out.
I guess something like robots.txt ("proxy.txt"?) so heavy traffic sites could automatically know how not to burn a site down would be a plus. =) - toprank, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've heard and experienced that Digg traffic doesn't necessarily drive clickthroughs, but that's pretty much a sweeping generalization. A friend of mine has a retails site that has hit the front page a few times and their logs show huge increases in registrations and repeat visits from Digg traffic.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"cut a link" is not a UK English phrase.
- energyblue, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@zach:
I see it more putting a "Do not read" sticker on a Diary.
Some people's blogs are for family/friends, not digg. - splintax, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"If that were true that getting a story on Digg was unprofitable, then why do all the Blog Spammers try their best to get front page stories on Digg?"
Because getting traffic to your blog boosts the size of your e-penis. Also, you might pick up a few dollars off AdSense if you've got a blog. Most people don't pay for hosting on their blog. - zachblume, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@energy: That's called a .htaccess or password
- rickcarson, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1"If you're not making more per page view than it costs to deliver the page, you're doing something wrong."
What about where the person doing the linking strips out your adds and replaces them with their own?
In that case, you get the bandwidth bill, and they get the add revenue. - ersnyder, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2That article got old relly fast. BOOOORRRRING.
- lowbot, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2There are only a handful of "big linking sites." Block them as referrers. Problem solved.
For extra privacy make your blog/whatever private. - rasheman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1It depends on if it's relevant traffic, too. For example, if you advertise online and sold widgets but suddenly you got a ton of traffic on how to use those widgets instead you'd be paying for a lot of bandwidth and get a lot of email/calls on how to use them. If the widget you sell has a lot of uses you could spend a lot of time and money with unwanted traffic. I also had a couple of IP addresses that this year that would scan my site repeatedly until I got warnings from my hosting service that my bandwidth was about to reach its limit (meaning I was about to have to pay for more without interrupted service). On a normal month I probably use about 8-15% of my allotted bandwidth
- Gregac, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0A nasty web site person if they were so inclined could also right a script that checks you browser last referrer, if it had say digg, or google anywhere in the referer line or you refused to send a referrer (A privacy feature of some firewalls) you would be denied viewing the website altogether. That could reduces some of there bandwidth cost, however, your server would be executing a lot of scripts to just check referrers too.
- Arizonab, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0It was a story on a journalism site and "cut a link" comes from journalism slang.
In the days of manual paste-up, if you wanted to add something to a story that was pasted up, you had to "cut it in" to the story because the "leg of type" (more slang) had to be cut to make the addition. The term "cut and paste" comes from the same era.
Broadcasters and film makers have similar slang because to add things in the pre-digital days you had to cut film or tape. In newspaper paste-up rooms, "cut the graph in here" meant add this paragraph at this location.
When newspapers began going online, the slang carried over to online newspapers. "Let's cut a link over to that story" meant let's add a link to that story. In the early days of online newspapers, you heard it a lot. Now not as much because the days of paste-up are getting more removed from most journalists' experience. While still commonly used, it's not universal. It was probably a mistake to use a slang term in this case.
Of course, slang can be confusing -- "cut" can also mean "to remove" in the traditional sense. For people familiar with the slang, the context was all they needed to know whether you were adding something or taking it out.
In this case though it's a reference to adding a link to some other content.
By the way, in case anyone is confused, the "how do you tell digg you don't want their traffic" is a rhetorical question, not literal.
The point of the remarks is that media sites should embrace people reading their content, no matter how it gets there. It's in response to some media sites looking to the courts (or other means) to control how others link to their content.
And yes, as some of you probably guessed, I'm Bob Cauthorn, the person who made the original remarks. Hope this clears any misunderstandings up. - RuddO, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1[sarcasm]Yes, it's almost like the thieves who skip the TV ads with their TiVos.[sarcasm]
What an imbecile's rhethoric you got goin' there, appy77 - diggaro, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I would think traffic from Digg would most likely be traffic that wouldn't get you much revenue. This is due to the fact that most Digg users are very internet savvy, and therefore know what a Google Adsense ad or banner is, and won't click on it.
- snetty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I've seen lots of comments like this, and at first glance, I'd agree. Of course, that's until I remember that Digg makes a profit... from advertising... you... do.... the... math.
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