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192 Comments
- kevinrose, on 10/12/2007, -8/+188well, that and it's my job ;)
- Matrixsjd, on 10/12/2007, -19/+197I dunno, you tell me lol you're posting
- Roger, on 10/12/2007, -9/+150Obviously we digg for the chicks and all the money.
- kevinrose, on 10/12/2007, -8/+148I digg because my 'digg' not only counts towards the masses seeing the story, but it also shares my interests with my friends through RSS and the friends feature.. No longer do editors dictate what is cool, the digg community does.
- polizzi82, on 10/12/2007, -2/+84I digg to procrastinate/avoid working. Helps the time go by faster.
- Ireland, on 10/12/2007, -11/+83I dunno, but 90% of CliffosakaJapan 's posts are dupes. So maybe he should spend more time using the ***** search-bar!!
- kevinrose, on 10/12/2007, -3/+65I try to submit something once or twice a week, but half the time it has already been submitted... So sometimes it can take hrs. of surfing to find a good story.. I don't actively look though - if I happen to find something cool, I submit it.
- wilwheaton, on 10/12/2007, -6/+61I digg because I like sharing interesting and useful things with people, and since I take so much from this community in the form of inspiration for one of my writing gigs (I'm the Geek News editor at Suicidegirls), I feel a need to give back whenever I can, both by submitting stories, and digging for new ones to hit the front page.
- kevinrose, on 10/12/2007, -3/+49Now we know why you digg Mr. Weblogs ;)
but.. I doubt the average site w/adsense is making $100-$500... no... anyone that has been homepaged care to confirm..? - dirtyfratboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+40Thank you for featuring me in this story!
Why and how is it financially possible that I spend so much time on Digg (7 hours a day according to Jason)? Well, I don't have a job as I am currently a student. Even though "Jason" calculates that 15 minutes is spent on every story submitted, it's pretty much impossible to find a high amount of quality material by randomly searching through news sites. Sometimes my friends refer me to sites and other times I look through other news sites. Most of my time is spent browsing through sites on Digg, just like everyone else. I certainly don't work for Digg, but this site does combine technology and headlines news sites, two of my favorite topics.
As wayjer puts it: "I love the fact that any time I sign on to digg I am amazed about something I had just read." - knightblade2oo4, on 10/12/2007, -12/+51I like to contribute to a community of people that have given me insight into many different issues and helped me in a lot of different ways.
- p9s50W5k4GUD2c6, on 10/12/2007, -5/+43I get a great deal of enrichment (and laughter) from Digg. The commentaries are equally as great as the stories. I have recently chosen to invest some of my time by adding content to Digg.
When you look at what gets transferred THRU this site each day, the amount of knowledge and insight is immense. I enjoy contributing to that transfer of knowledge as well as benefiting from the extraordinary expertise from so many users.
I Digg to make a difference. - Daniel591992, on 10/12/2007, -10/+46"I dunno, but 90% of CliffosakaJapan 's posts are dupes. So maybe he should spend more time using the ***** search-bar!!"
Now there, ladies and gentlemen, is a perfect exapmple fo someone who spends a little too much time on digg =P - digitalgopher, on 10/12/2007, -3/+38For what it's worth, here's my point of view - Quite simply, I see Digg as the world's best RSS aggregator. It's is one of the best sites on the net, hands down. Especially for us tech fans. I've learned a lot of cool stuff on this site that I would have never come across before on the web because it would be impossible to have access to everything all the time... and yes there are crap posts on occasion, but by and large, there's some real quality tech stuff on here. So if I can spend a couple of hours a day on one site where all that information is aggregated by other users for me, then what more could one want?
In terms of submissions, I submit because there are cool stories that I might myself run across on the web and want to share those with others. If it's something that people will enjoy, then great - it will presumably get enough diggs and get seen by many more on the front page. Otherwise it will either get buried or disappear into the void.
In defense of dirtyfratboy, if the submits say 3 stories a day at 15 mins per post (which is a flawed estimate by the way), that's 45 minutes he's spent per day. I think it's fair to say that many people spend way more than 45 minutes a day on the Internet. The estimate for time/post is much less, because many of us read the morning tech news - for example I read news.com every morning with my coffee and if there's an interesting article, I'll spend the extra minute to post it on digg.
Sorry to make this long. Just my two cents. - RyeBrye, on 10/12/2007, -3/+35It's all about the little number that goes next to your name. It is addictive.
- konspence, on 10/12/2007, -14/+45The time to edit comments is 300 seconds, right? Your's were posted a minute apart. Cool, Digg has different classes of users (most would be flamed for double posting and not using edit, but it's kevinrose!)
Eh, this comment is flamebait. - cmajewski, on 10/12/2007, -5/+35Not the best analysis, but I rather like the questions posed. Why spend so much time...they don't work for Digg? I'd say most people enjoy contributing to the greater good ie. the spreading of knowledge. Of course it almost goes without saying that others get some kind of rush seeing THEIR link to a story make the front page...I guess there is something rewarding in that for them.
- jdawg, on 10/12/2007, -2/+32Kevin: you're correct, most folks don't RPM at $10, they RPM at $2.... making the money issue even less important.
In terms of WIN, Digg can't move the needle on 90% of our sites any more. We've got the AOL welcome screen now and that can drive 50-500k pages in a couple of hours.
However, for new blogs there is nothing like a couple of DIGGs to get people aware of a new brand. HDBeat and Divester built a large % of their audience from DIGG.
Of course, BloggingBaby and Gadling are never gonna do well on DIGG due to their vertical.
Bottom line: the contribution level of the top 100 people is just *stunning* in terms of quality and quantity. - RyeBrye, on 10/12/2007, -16/+45I didn't see who that comment was coming from until I saw that you said "that, and it's my job"... Perhaps in Digg 3.0 you can have random prizes given to people for funny comments... I'm willing to beta test this feature for you... A Hummer would be a good prize to start with.
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -6/+32I'd like to suggest that the 15 minute estimate is complete *****. I can find 3 decent stories in 60 seconds, easily: Simply rip off posts from slashdot, fark, boing boing, and the like.
I'm willing to bet that's what many of the biggest digg-whores do. Lord knows digg ends up with tons of stories that have already hit the other big sites. From today:
Hit the slashdot front page 4 hours ago:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/22/183205
Hit the digg front page under an hour ago:
http://www.digg.com/security/Reporting_Vulnerabilities_is_for_the_Brave - exoendo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+27dirtyfrat boy is my mortal digg enemy :) I remember back a long time ago that we were neck and neck for a while, this is when he was in the 20's or so. He would go up a bit, then I would. Then, one day... dirtyfratboy just wouldn't stop. I think that kid eats nothing but redbull and poprocks. I gave up :(
Though I am nowhere near as elite as our friend dirty, osaka, or a whole host of others, I can give some advice being a top 80ish user:
RSS Feeds. Lots of them. Bookmarklets too.
Every few months or so I'll go on what I call a digging spree, where I basically submit 100+ stories in about a weeks time, and about 8-10 of those stories will get dugg to the front page. It's really not hard if you commit the time.
Also, I've noticed the following times for when the newswires are most active:
7:30 am
1030: am
1:30 pm
4:30 pm
5:30 pm
7:30 pm
Those times are fairly consistent.
When finding stories, I would always make sure to be on at those times, then search all my rss feeds for new stories coming in, and then quickly submit them to digg.
Now then, every once in a while I'll have some gem, not really a news story but just something cool I found on the internet. With a story like this, I usually submit it around 12 am eastern time. What happens is digg slows down, but there are still a lot of west coasters on that will do one last digging before going to sleep... throughout the night, if your story is decent, you'll get around 30-40 diggs. Then in the morning, your story is right on the edge for people to digg as they wake up, and you are quickly promoted. The reason for this timing is that with breaking news stories, those sell themselves, and if you are first to submit it, it's going to the homepage. With a gem however, it may be overlooked and lost in the shuffle.
When I first signed up for digg, I would only submit gems, and my digg success was 80%. Once I started mass submittion, my rate went to the crapper :(
Also: this may start getting you into lame terroritory, but if you can get a discussion going in your comments after you submit a story, it'll keep popping up in diggspy, and more people may notice it.
Hope my post was interesting at least a little :)
- exo - jdawg, on 10/12/2007, -4/+24If you think about it some folks actually digg for money because they are promoting their blogs/sites. One digg will get you 10-50k pages and if you're making a $10 RPM that's $100-500 every time you hit the home page.
So, there is a huge financial incentive. However, I agree it is for recognition and affiliation.
How long does it take to find and submit a good DIGG is the one piece I'm curious about. I think 10-20 minutes... I based my table (updated the blog post above) on 15 minutes. - TheAttacks, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20I spend hours in my computer classes at school surfing digg, i mean, who needs to REALLY know how to use ms word?
- dirtyfratboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19Actually, that's just Bill Gates' mugshot. I wonder if people have recognized it yet...
- etruscan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+21Fortune and glory, my good friend.
Fortune... and glory.. - konspence, on 10/12/2007, -4/+20Many digg users simply ignore ads, or use adblock. I highly doubt, like Kevin said, that they would make 100 dollars on several thousand visitors.
- Lumiras, on 10/12/2007, -3/+19I digg because I can..........that's really the core of the whole thing
I spend a lot of time on this site, sure, but it makes me feel like I'm part of a really cool club that nobody knows about, kind of a secret society. Sure, people may talk about us, but the Digg community is a hard nut to crack.
We're not all hardcore hardware geeks, we're not all huge gamers, we're not all expert hackers, we're not all gadget mavens, but we have all of those people on this site.
I would say that Digg has a very balanced community, despite the fact that we do have our spammers, and we do have our immature pricks, but with a population this big it's inevitable.
All the idiots aside, I think that I find that Digg is the most informative site on the net because of the people. Sure, the stories may be interesting, but it's the differing opinions of the users that really keeps things going. Quite often, I can learn more about a story in the comments than in the actual story itself. It's great, and it's why I'm proud to be a (very) frequent commenter to this site [I would love to see the calculation on how much time Thenativeraver, WackyT and I have spent making comments :) ]
All in all, this site is really the best thing to happen to technology and geek culture in a long, long, long time - wayjer, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16I just enjoy Digg, I love technology and everything about it. I enjoy the community interaction within the comments section, especially with those on my friends list, whom are mostly just like me, submitters. I love the fact that any time I sign on to digg I am amazed about something I had just read. I like to submit and see my stories make the front page, it lets me have a feeling that alot of people are interested in stuff that I like too. I like to digg my friends stories and help them reach the front page also, I just like digg, what else can I say. Digg rules!nI do not work for Digg, but I do work from home so I have more time to digg than most.
- tysonhy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14I agree with everything that you said. By browsing users submitted stories, you can learn a lot of stuff and also know what's going on around the world and the net. Another thing that I like about digg, is you can see what's the latest trend on the web. There is a lot of great websites out there but I wouldn't have found it without digg so you can see where digg can be very useful and which will have someone spending a long time on digg. I do submit a lot of stories here on digg and sometimes it can take a while to submit a "good one" but when that story is promoted to the front page it's worth it. I visit digg many many times a day and it's addicting, I probably spend at least 8-10+ hours every day on digg but I make time to do it.
- capn_caveman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14I'll have to admit: all of your posts seem to be inherently interesting. I know that you don't work for digg any more than I do. And I don't even remotely spend 15 minutes of time searching for each submission I make. There are better ways :)
- Livewire, on 10/12/2007, -7/+19no cuz then digg freaks will create an enormous amount of accounts and then proceed to log in and out of each one, giving themselves diggs and burying other users for days on end.
- thespacepope, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13"Why spend so much time...they don't work for Digg?"
We're not getting paid, but in a way, we all work for digg. At least those of us who digg and/or comment. We're not getting paid, but as a group we're working to make digg the best site we can.
Digging/burying comments is addictive too. I find that if I do it long enough, I start wanting to digg/bury stuff all over the internet. "This page sucks, where the bury button?" - capn_caveman, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14I'm loaded on red bull and pop rocks right now.
- floguy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14I Digg so that someday they'll say "submitted by floguy" on Diggnation.
- rkuchiki, on 10/12/2007, -7/+17"I Digg to make a difference."
I love that. That is a great attitude. I also seen some comments regarding hoping to hear their name on Diggnation, which I expected. But the overall fact is, this is a great site, and even though I only recently found Digg and Revision3, I already subscribed to the donation system, simply because I love sites like this that change how we look at things.
The concept behind Digg and Revision3 is awesome. Everyone here (not just Kevin and Alex) keep digging and keep up the great work. - BugMeNot2, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Simply put, we spend time contributing to Digg because we like Digg.
- fitzfan, on 10/12/2007, -4/+14Becuase i cant be on the frontpage of Google.
- SirCharge, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11It passes the time between arriving at work and leaving.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10I'm one of him friends and he hasn't logged on to yahoo to talk for months now. I'm really starting to worry for him. He was an inspiration to me to go on digg. and many other things including switching to Firefox. I remember asking him once why he contributed so much time to Digg and he responded by saying it's for the love of it. He doesn't care about his ranking. He wished that digg ddn't have rankings at all. He'd lose alot of trouble from people IMing him and saying he's on 24/7 and stuff. He's not.
- armbar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"how do I delete this damn comment..."
We've got you covered. - cks3, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I digg cool stories to pay back for the cool stories I've found on digg. It's like donating books to the library.
- jdawg, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11Well, I think we all understand why folks contribute... my question centers around these uber-diggers.
Folks who have submitted, let's say, over 500 stories.
On that list of the top ten how many work for DIGG or own a site do you think? Right now I think the answer is none.
That's amazing... the top users are just normal people. - TheAttacks, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Can't believe I made that list, but meh, that's cool.
- nextsteposx, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10I have Digg addiction...
- digitalgopher, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9It's a great pic! FYI - initially I added you to my friends list JUST for the profile pic. :)
- EPeters, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9I just want to know what happened to the greatest digger of all time; Albert Pacino. He COMPLETELY disappeared! If you check out his comments, he was the most diplomatic digg user EVER, and should be an inspiration to us all.
- lemorex, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I wish life had the little thumbs up/ thumbs down rating, because my boss would be buried by now...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10I have to admit, every time I have access to the Internet at my school, even for only five minutes, I open up two tabs in firefox: one of digg and one of gmail. Most of the time I'll just look around and "digg" the ones I think are interesting but sometimes I will catch myself going to the diggspy and digging those that were just submitted like 3 minutes ago.
Digg is always active, and the statistics person I am, I like to look at things through numbers as well. I'm actually developing software that will watch the digg spy feed every minute or so and grab the activity of digging on certain stories so I can study and "watch" the actual development of stories from submission to front page. - haxx4, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10You should work for digg!
- exoendo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9cleary not :p
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