Six months ago, I wrote about my frustrations with Digg.com, the news aggregation site where people vote stories up or down. I had just landed my first front-page submission, at the time a fairly unusual event for me. See, you sign up with Digg thinking that all you have to do is find an original item online and the inherent democracy of the site will make that story popular.
That's not how it works, though, and six months later I feel like I understand the process a lot better. For one thing, Digg isn't a story-based meritocracy; it's a user-based meritocracy. You may have found and submitted the perfect story, but if you haven't made friends and built a virtual support group, no one's going to be around to support your submission.
Luckily, anyone can build a support group as long as they're patient. You start by adding other users as your friends, and eventually a few of them start adding you back. You submit stories until one or two of them take off, and then more people want to be your friend by virtue of the fact you make the front page. And you start to learn a few patterns, such as don't submit to the World News section on a Monday morning (basically the same impact as spitting into a black hole). Before you know it, you're getting a couple of successful stories a week. Then you get a couple in a row.
As I type this, I have 7 stories submitted with a chance of making the front page. My overall success rate is 12% of submitted stories, so in theory one of these should go. If it does, I'll sit back and watch the ripple effect, from the comments other Diggers post to the failure rate of the hosting site. But mostly I'm just glad that I understand something that once seemed incomprehensible.
Oh, and did I mention that out of a million registered users, I was the 20th "most powerful" last month? Because I was. Just saying.
Monday update: Two of the stories I submitted Sunday morning did in fact make the front page overnight. The system works!
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