A few weeks ago, Digg announced its intentions to move into restaurant and product reviews. Cashmore was optimistic about Digg changing its demographic, citing Facebook as an example of how that is possible. But I would first point at Netscape. Netscape, under the leadership of ex-CEO Calacanis, tried to take mainstream people and throw them into social media. The (terrible) results speak for themselves.
Check out the graph to the right. 
If you take that graph and go back another six months (when the switch was made), Netscape has lost nearly half of its daily page views and has dropped 200 points in the site rankings.
Netscape’s experiment shows that regular people may not be interested in interactive news in the way geeks are. I think it makes sense: how many times have you heard someone gloss over your explanation of something and say, “I don’t care, I just want to use it.” Regular consumers want to consume, not contribute, even if it is as little as clicking a button. This means that even with more readers, Digg’s stories would stay heavily technology oriented, eventually pushing mainstream readers away again.
Also, Digg isn’t Facebook. Facebook can introduce stuff nobody likes and get away with it because hey have the stickiness of a social network. Just look at Myspace and its garbage user interface, friend spamming, and ugly profiles. It doesn’t matter. Besides, Facebook expanded its audience in such a way as to not impact the current core functionality or site experience – another key reason why the expansion was a success.
There are other factors that worry me about Digg’s model being applied to products and restaurants:
- Digg is highly anti-commercial. Articles are buried (rejected) for merely being blogs due to suspected “blog spam” (making money from the ads). How would that mix with reviews?
- Restaurants are extremely local in nature. Digg is global. Even 20 miles is too far to make a review relevant most of the time.
- Fanaticism would run rampant. Anybody could vote up a product review without actually having or used the product. This means simple fan-boy-ism could boost an otherwise crappy product to the top spot without a single person ever even seeing the item in person.
- Who is qualified to vote up a review on a restaurant they’ve never been to? Maybe the entire staff at the place? (see next point)
- The system introduces a huge incentive for commercial postings.
- The surge of commercial postings creates an reason for users to bury reviews very defensively.
- Defensive burying is a problem because genuine reviews require a lot of effort. Unlike news postings, a good review (commercial or not) would take hours to compile. It would be a strong deterrent for first time reviewers if their first submission was rejected for being “too commercial” simply for having ads on their blog.
I think Digg would be making a mistake by entering these markets. Review sites already exist for various products and are well indexed. Digg would, in the very best scenario, be spammed up with links to these sites. In the worst case, Digg would have wasted months trying to go “mainstream” only to further alienate users.
Digg already does social news well, and it needs to focus on doing that better. Digg should really focus on enhanced personalization so that each account gets its own customized list of “top” news items — this was another prong of the original announcement and I think they are dead on there.
It probably has to do with it being someone’s passion at digg to do restuarant reviews. They probably could bring innovation to it and bringing it under the digg name might help to launch it, but I by no means think they should have it a s a main part of the site.
#8: dude, that’s an awesome picture (click the link).
I don’t know why, but Pat’s comment makes me smile.
Although I agree with the points you mention pertaining to the specifics of the implementation such as the need of geo-targeting for service reviews, I feel that user generated reviews in general have enough of a broad appeal to provide value to the Digg reader base since over 90% of all internet surfers research their purchases online. Whether there is a “geek†factor or not, that would only affect the breadth of reviews versus their value to the community.
I also don’t necessarily agree with the fact most consumers only want to consume and not contribute when it comes to their consumer experiences. Data shows that over two thirds of all economic activity in North America is influenced by peer opinions and although the majority of this takes place offline today, why would it not be applicable online?
Even though Digg is entering a market that competes with us directly, I applaud the move. I think peer experiences have an intrinsic monetary value that should be factored into every purchase. This means that I can see the day when every purchase will have an opportunity for the consumer to recoup some of their cost by sharing their experiences with peers, and the more players that jump on this bandwagon and provide vehicles to voice those opinions, the more legitimacy and growth will happen within the entire consumer experience market.
This is a horrible idea, digg should not turn into Facebook.
I agree, a restaurant review section on Digg is such a strange move. From tech to restaurant reviews? What an odd move.
If you look at Digg now, you can see that the traffic sent by the site to homepage stories is already dropping off. Alexa data (I know, not a true reflection) also suggests stagnation, with a trend downwards.
The last thing on their mind show be expansion away from their core competency, ie. tech.
good points, I’d also add that Digg users aren’t looking for reviews, they generally know what they want and are capable of doing their own research. It just feels like Digg is trying to expand and the staff can’t come up with any other ideas.
digg is not global. you only have to live outside the US to realise that.
hmm.. I agree.. i just don’t see how the restaurant reviews fit into the Digg “core business”. At first look it would seem a great idea.. but you make a good point on why it’s not.
btw, on that graph, I would say that they go from about ~2.5 to about ~1.7 (eye-balling an average for peaks) – so not exactly a half of page views.. but still a significant chunk.