Digg's Community Cemetery | How Do We, and Digg, Fix It ?

Everyone has opinions about Digg’s communities.

So let’s skip vibes and rhetoric and go straight to the numbers.

14,487 total communities.

10,483 have zero posts.

4,744 have only one member; 4,228 of those have no posts at all.

1,352 communities have exactly two posts total; 274 of those also have only one member.

Put plainly:

Digg has over ten thousand completely silent communities.

Nearly five thousand one-person islands.

And more than thirteen hundred communities that stalled after exactly two posts, with 274 literal solo acts talking to themselves twice and leaving.

This matters.

Digg is carrying a massive amount of inert mass. Discovery tools and most importantly, the users have to swim through that inertia whenever something “random” is surfaced.

The data is shouting: Digg doesn’t need more communities.

It needs state awareness . A very clear distinction between dormant, seeded, breathing, active, and fossilized communities.

Without those distinctions, dormant communities blend in with active ones, adding friction to discovery.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

-- Data is from LiveSearchApp

All Comments (116)

@midi002

11 days ago

> On Digg's Community Cemetery and how to fix it.

On I have 3 things that may seem a little awkward at first, but makes sense.

In my about section I have:

- a link to my growth chart.

- I put hashtags for important keywords

- I link other communities and resources important to the theme of my community. This includes a youtube and a reddit.com subreddit (their communities)

In the 90's, I was a kid with a modem. I learned about BBS systems. I would dial in and it would be an early, slow bulletin board system and forum. One of the better BBS systems would have a list of all known local BBS telephone numbers. The phone number (this is what was used, not URLs).

Then again on Reddit in the 2010's, I would see people linking websites, resources, other communities, and things that would specifically empower the user in their about sections.

This technique helped strengthen the ecosystem holistically.

I think focusing on the writing of about sections, linking other communities and resources, as well as adding good tools and simple keywords are key things both community moderators and users should be using. This will transform Digg's repositary of siloed communities into a living contextual network of thought.

And, my favorite part, this is human driven. It's not automated unthoughtful output. It's revised by humans, written in context, and the moderator has control. Not a 3rd party or an angry user.