What is the Digg Effect?
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Well, my humble attempt at creating some activity on digg for a recent post didn’t quite pan out.
On a side note: I believe that is because the total effort required for a new person to get digging is too much.
Today I talk about another basic term Evangelists and System Admins
should be aware of today (granted: it has been around for more than a
year now).
I’m talking about www.digg.com. Digg is a “social newspaper” — a news site where the people (YOU) decide which story on the internet is worth being on the front page of the virtual newspaper.
It is a fantastic demonstration of the effects of collective wisdom, and a great way to find news from the fringes that mainstream newspapers wont cover.
So what happens if your website lands on the front page? This article describes it well, but basically you get a sudden spike in web traffic that often your servers will not be able to handle. Digg users are proud of this “Digg Effect”.
What is so special anyway?
So earlier we talked about the Network Effect, which was a pull in interest and leads for your products / brand because of purely social or relationship-based effects. Marketing people specialized in word-of-mouth marketing spend the better half of their lives studying this.
The Digg Effect, on the other hand, is much more interesting. It is based on the idea of “collective wisdom” (cannot remember who coined the term) — that often people in a large enough number analyzing something collectively can yield better results than seasoned analysts.
The interesting thing is that this creates the same sense of insurance about a product than the Network Effect can. Even though anonymous strangers will vote on what they feel is a relevant story, collectively, new strangers looking at that will be compelled (perhaps out of curiosity) to explore other strangers recommendations.
Hmm…. maybe this is the virtual version of how all Pakistani people will gather immediately at the site of an accident?
Maybe. Or maybe it is part of general human nature to feel more secure with being one element of the greater opinions of masses, rather than the person on the fringe. It would be interesting to measure the correlation between Digg users and Social outcasts.
What do you guys think? Do you agree with peoples’ votes on www.digg.com ?
9:29 am
What about the fark effect or slashdot effect ? Are all of these same or different .. And how system admins handle these kinds of effects ?
10:39 am
Digg, for the most part, brings up some fantastic stories/pictures/events to the fore that you’d probably never hear about. So I’m a big fan … and yes the Digg Effect can sometimes be annoying when you see the dreaded `Page Not Found` or `Internal Server Error` when you eagerly click on a story.
12:15 pm
Also check out http://www.netscape.com (Shameless plug for my employer)