March 7, 2007
Congratulations to Digg, which 
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Huser
lol, i have about 10 accounts there also…
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JoshLowry
Congratulations Digg!
You guys have done really well and I wish you the best!
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Don Wilson
To put this into perspective, MySpace has 250,000 new users a day.
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...some Drifter
you don’t have to rain on their parade, don
regardless, a million mark is a note-worthy accomplishment
i don’t use digg. i’m not too fond of that model. i read what i want to read, i could care less how many, or few, people like it
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David Russell
Wow. I remember hearing a few months back that digg had hit the 750,000 mark. I knew 1,000,000 was just around the corner. It’s really quite an achievement. Congratulations to all involved.
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vslog
Given the PR and the hype around it, I am surprised they only have a million users to show for it…
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Emily Sweet
You can have multiple accounts? Oh you mean you sign up with all your freemail accounts so you can digg your own submissions…that’s cute
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SearcH EngineSWeB
this is amazing - however, some accounts could be duplications
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Sean O
And how many of them are non-duplicates and active (within last 60 days)? Maybe around 20%…
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Brent Ritterbeck
I like the concept of Digg. There is so much information on the web to sort through, most of it being drivel, that I appreciate the service Digg provides. Digg digests a huge chunk of news, presenting what many perceive to be actually worth reading. In today’s world, people simply do not have the time to wade through web page after web page of news stories to find one or two nuggets of interesting news. Digg, for the most part, presents on its home page a distilled version of the web news space; I call Digg a useful site.
The only issue I do have with Digg is that much of the news is technology related. What if someone were to create a service similar to Digg that focused solely on financial news. No longer would it be up to Bloomberg’s or CNN’s editors to tell me and the rest of the investing public what is important financial news. It’s an idea that is worth looking into.
I am well aware that Digg has a business section, but I am imaging a site completely devoted to finance. Perhaps the next step in Web 2.0 is to break down these huge services, like Digg and YouTube, and start targeting very specific groups of people. Perhaps some entrepreneurs with the skills to do it should develop purely financial versions of Digg and purely financial versions of YouTube. -
other
Thanks for making that crazy chart
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other
“Given the PR and the hype around it, I am surprised they only have a million users to show for it…”
Amen, in a global sense, 1 mil is nothing for all the hype. Especially considering all the account BS mentioned in the comments. So I guess with Digg you ha… snoooooooooorrrrrrrre.
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Brian Laks
I wonder if it would be Digg making the subsections on their site, or another startup site using digg-like functionality to target the niche. It seems like it would be easier for digg to take what they already have and specialize, than for a new company to start from scratch. Also, I would be interested in knowing what percent of the users are duplicate (is there a way for them to know that?), since even a small percent, say 10%, would be 100,000 accounts.
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Brent Ritterbeck
Brian, I don’t think it would be all that difficult to create a niche site. Naturally, one would aim to add other features to the financial version of Digg I am imaging.
How about this? You combine what Digg is good for, print materials, with podcast material as well, put up by the collective user base. Somehow an algorithm deduces what are the most popular podcasts, voted on by the users, and splices them together to form a roughly 30 minute evening roundup of the day’s good ideas.
The whole point of my previous post was to emphasize that the collective work of the investing public could probably do a better job than a few editors at the major financial publishing firms.
I don’t think the Web 2.0 ideas have fully matured, and I was just trying to create discussion on a subject that is near and dear to me. -
awesomo
Wow, 1 million registered users and not a trace of intelligence on that site!
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Amy Wilsch
@Don and I know people who have probably 100 myspace accounts….
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John
and you dont really need to register to use digg
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Pirata o'Hara
@awesomo
maybe there’s no trace of intelligence, but hell for sure it’s more intelligence there than what you have. If Digg was sold today even for significantly less than they’d like to, they’d still make more cash than what you’re earning baby sitting for your boss
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RBA
Ok, so the “registered users” metric doesn’t tell much. Nothing new here. Of course when it comes to count users the best metric is “current active users”, and even so, one would have to define what “active” means.
Either way, creating that 1,000,000 record in the database is a milestone - why not celebrate it? What one should watch - not for Digg but for any company - is how that milestone is being announced. If you do it making the point that some accounts are dupes/dead, then you’d have scored some good points in the honesty book, although not in the PR book. And everyone’s playing the PR game, like it or not.
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Drama 2.0
“Digg digests a huge chunk of news, presenting what many perceive to be actually worth reading.”
Digg digests a huge chunk of mostly tech news, presenting what a small group of geeks perceive to be actually worth reading, making it entirely useless and irrelevant to the majority of the population.
“In today’s world, people simply do not have the time to wade through web page after web page of news stories to find one or two nuggets of interesting news.”
In today’s world, people simply do not have the mental capacity to sort through information and to critically analyze it so they rely on the collective opinion of a small group of people who have nothing better to do than to Digg news articles.
“Perhaps the next step in Web 2.0 is to break down these huge services, like Digg and YouTube, and start targeting very specific groups of people.”
Already being done.
“It seems like it would be easier for digg to take what they already have and specialize, than for a new company to start from scratch.”
Perhaps, but not necessarily. Digg’s primary audience is technology geeks. This type of audience may be useless for other types of niches. Also, why anybody would want to copy Digg’s model is beyond me. Does Digg have some measure of popularity? Sure. But 1 million registered users (how many of which are truly active is probably substantially smaller) is not a significant amount in the overall scheme of things, particularly when you consider the fairly insignificant amount of revenues Digg reportedly generates and its lack of profitability. Why duplicate something that really hasn’t developed into a viable business? Coupled with the flaws in their model that leave the system open to abuse, I would hope that the smart entrepreneurs out there would build something truly innovative or significantly improve the Digg model than to just duplicate the same concept for some other niche.
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its4us2think
Some of the commenters here claims that digg is silly, insignificant, not a big thing etc. Are they really jealous of it already? I thought bigger a company is, more hatred spewed by people. I guess digg is really something people hate even before it has become big or they hate digg because they envy them?!!
I cant get these guys !!
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Morgan
I think Digg’s a pretty great idea. and still decent sometimes, but it’s definitely deteriorating over time. We’ll see if they can adjust the mechanics to make it better, but right now it’s pretty weak.
One thing I’ve never understood is why you can digg stories from the Digg site. They should restrict it to voting from the page the actual story is on, to at least show enough commitment to have loaded the page instead of just clicking an icon.
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Nifty
Digg is a killer one and I love it.
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PohEe.com
Hi Huser #1,
Why you need so many accounts for? Mind to tell? -
Bob Kabob
Reason for multiple accounts:
You say something stupid, and regret it. Abandon that account, and start fresh! I wish the real world was like that!
OK, now I need to go change my TechCrunch user name….
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baron
I admire your candor.
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Michael Hoffman
I am not a huge fan of Digg, but I think the revolution in “Digg-like” features has been positive. I don’t like Digg because I think the masses can be pretty lame, as we know also from YouTube. It’s the crap, not the cream, that often rises to the top… I also really wonder what they have long-term as a business. People invest time in their MySpace page and their YouTube videos. Digg seems to me more like a feature than a company, one with a small core of heavy users that have a big impact. Care2 (www.care2.com) is a good example of a real community that added a “Digg-like” feature successfully and I think this is a model — a set of users with some commonality — that creates better results.
The best kind of Digg would be one that combines editorial judgment with user voting — oh, we already have that. It’s called the “most emailed” articles, most blogged articles, most discussed articles at all the major news sites.
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Brent Ritterbeck
Michael Hoffman,
You have a valid point of view. As a single idea, Digg doesn’t stand to become a billion dollar company, but if you were to incorporate the Digg model into other services, it would be a great means of organizing data for a user base.
Going back to the posts I wrote earlier, it would be nice to incorporate Digg’s model into a website dealing with financial ideas, just one unique service among many designed to help organize relevant financial data for individual investors. I personally would love to launch a startup around helping organize data for the individual investor, but I realize that I do not yet have the skills necessary to do that. I plan to enter the 2008 spring competition of Y Combinator with a concept for a user driven financial website, but I have much to learn about web development before then.
To keep track of where I stand in learning web development, and my progress towards entering the 2008 spring Y Combinator competition, I developed a blog. I only have one post currently, but it explains what my goals are for the next year. -
Kula bácsi
Are just 1M retards out there? I can’t believe it, must be more…
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xxdesmus
I love the fact that several self proclaimed “intelligent” people were forecasting that Digg was nothing more than a silly trend that would fade out within a year or two ….yeah, how is that plan working out guys?
Digg is nice for some things, but the comments for the articles are worse than useless. The site is flooded with Sony PS3 fanboys, iPod fanboys, Apple fanboys, and Linux fanboys. I use it occasionally to find interesting articles, but don’t even try to have an intelligent conversation with anyone on that site.
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soxiam
one of my biggest pet peeves… using “users” and “accounts” as if they are interchangeable.
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Go Away Digg
So with 1MM registered users, their revenue-to-user ratio is still $0.00 right?
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awesomo
@Pirata o’Hara
Please do not equate intelligence with money! If you spend 10 minutes in the comments section of Digg, you will understand what I meant with my comment. Also, keep the personal attacks to yourself; I have a great, well paying job and I am my own boss. Also, some of us are interested in more than just money.
Cheers!
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james
Now its time to monetize the site.
Bhahaha 10 accounts. spammer
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aje
Digg is about entertaintment.
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Mike
Really good growth although I wonder how much of it may be spam related.
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Watching With Interest
These comments make me think a lot of Digg users came over to TechCrunch. It’s almost like comment spam but generated by actual humans with computers!
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Ron Diggity
1 million great, cause at least 100 accounts I created to see if I could game the system, so they’re still off by a little.
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Raj
Really awesome …!!!
…. superb DIGG …. superb …. gr8 work -
Doug Karr
Does that include those of us who have been banned?
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Steve Severance
I used to be a dig user until they branched out from technology. It was easy to use the digg addin via netvibes. But when they expanded what they covered to include politics I got fed up and stopped being a regular visitor. I still digg things that I think are interesting but I no longer use digg as my primary means of gathering information. I have been using TailRank alot recently.
Now I do not hate digg, in fact I think the idea is very powerful. But I think that these days alot of junk makes its way onto the front page and I still have to check other sources to make sure that the Bury Brigade has not buried something important. Maybe one of these days I will give it another go.
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Joe Duck
Having 10 accounts is a *very* important aspect of all this. When I joined Digg to test it I quickly incurred some wrath for digging my own posts, which is considered bad form. Ironically of course is that unlike my transparent behavior SEO people are opening many fake “Sock Puppet” accounts and then also have friends cross Digg posts to artificially launch stories. The prevalence of these multiple and bogus accounts is critical to DIGGING the DIGG phenomenon. I’m guessing the problem is NOT as bad as has been widely reported.
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eric
They should allow you a way to associate accounts together that are under the same owner. Some of you may think this is a bad idea and would identify spammers - but thats sort of the point. It would also allow their system to see how many “real” accounts they have.
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Ayal Rosenthal
How many people have accounts at multiple Federated Media Publishing sites? OBviously, with such a large population there will be some overlap (such as with Digg or BuzzMachine) but I would think that multiple account holders are the most valuable eyeballs for advertisers.
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1389
My user ID, namely 1389, was banned from Digg within MINUTES after I posted these three comments:
http://www.901am.com/2007/has-.....mment-3992
http://digg.com/tech_news/1_Mi.....s#c5594565
http://digg.com/software/Digg_.....e#c5594665I still have yet to hear any reason why Digg account 1389 was banned. But that’s to be expected. What are they supposed to tell me - that 1389 was banned for whistleblowing? I can figure that out for myself; the timing made it just too obvious.
As if all that were not enough, several people on my friends list have recently been banned, also without an explanation. But then, they’d been making much the same complaints about the bury brigade as I had been making.
The only reason I was still active on Digg is because it still reaches such a huge audience. However - usage has already begun to fall off, and as soon as a competitor starts gaining on them sufficiently, I’ll know where to go.
Since I no longer have anything to lose, or anything to protect, let me tell it like it is.
[flame on]
Digg is a cesspool. Its admins are worthy of the Soviet bureaucracy under Andropov or Chernenko. Its programmers are stumped at anything more demanding than “Hello, World.”
Kevin Rose is a kid who happened to be in the right place at the right time. But he is out of his depth, and his impenetrable solipsism and his crowd of worshippers keeps him from knowing just how far out of his depth he actually is. He is too immature and irresponsible to face facts and confront problems rather than covering them up. That’s a recipe for squandering all of his initial advantage, and I can see it happening now.
Is Kevin in on the corruption at Digg? I don’t know. But then, I am not aware of any way that Kevin would been able to turn a legitimate profit from Digg thus far - and if that is correct, the temptation would certainly exist.
The real issue is that there is no transparency about what Digg admins, programmers, and owners are doing with their power to promote some stories and bury others - because they can pass off the outcome as “the democratic decision of the Digg user base.”
What controls are there to stop Digg insiders from using this power to promote various scams, such as blogola/”Diggola,” political campaign dirty tricks, securities trading pump-and-dump, and who knows what all else? I’ve been around computers and in the business world long enough to know that whenever proper controls are lacking, miscreants will find and make use of the vulnerabilities.
One million Digg users? Yeah, right! I wonder how many are dupes, or sock puppets - how many represent accounts that Digg has disabled for real or alleged “abuse” - and how many represent legitimate users who tried Digg for a little while, got disgusted, and resolved never to come back.
With perhaps a million registered users, and maybe ten times that many lurkers who read Digg stories without signing up, that’s the population of a major metropolitan area. In a population that size, there is no way to exclude sex perverts, cyberstalkers, identity thieves, and criminals and crazies of every possible stripe, including actual jihadists and their sympathizers. But it’s little use to report even the most flagrant of them to abuse@digg.com, because the victim is as likely to be banned as the perpetrator! After all, some of these abusers come in handy for chasing away ordinary Digg users who happen to espouse points of view that Digg prefers to suppress.
Finally, if you are a Digg user, and you get tired of all this and decide you aren’t interested in using that account any more - you’ll find there is no way to get Digg to cancel or delete the account. It stays out there forever, thus artificially inflating their account totals. That makes Digg look much more influential than it really is, for the benefit of potential advertisers, investors, and so forth. And that’s on top of the sock puppet/banned account issue already discussed above!
[flame off]
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HMTKSteve
Only ten extra accounts? That is on the low side!
Some folks (not going to name any names) create a new account every day, digg a little with it and then save it for future gaming use.
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Baynado
In comparison to digg is in Germany there is only yigg.de with a few registered user
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CB
You guys are pathetic. If you hate digg, stop giving it press. Stop whining about it, stop talking about, STOP GOING THERE. All you are doing is giving them more exposure and probably sending more people there to see what the controversy is all about.
March 7th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
March 9th, 2007 at 1:23 am
April 20th, 2007 at 3:14 am
June 14th, 2007 at 6:43 am
June 30th, 2007 at 2:29 am
July 2nd, 2007 at 5:22 am