Digg in Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Pardon my pun, but it’s true: Digg.com is at a crossroads that’s making it hard for them to grow. Here are the issues at hand:

• Digg is trying to go mainstream and thus alienating their current audience (who are not mainstream)
• Digg’s core users joined when it was about finding niche articles
• People try to game Digg every day (and succeed)

Combine these three factors, and you have a lot of unsatisfied “customers.”

Digg no longer serves a niche. When I first found Digg a year ago, it was amazing: you could always find new hidden treasures of the Internet on the front page. But nowadays, it has swerved dramatically “mainstream”, constantly covering the same anti-Iraq or pro-iPhone stories or spammed with links to funny pictures.

Digg’s hot topics have evolved into more mainstream dialog (inevitable as more users join). This alienates well-informed readers who first began at Digg looking for cutting edge articles not to be found anywhere else.

And of course, there is daily garbage that manages to reach the front page. With the increased exposure that Digg has, it is no wonder that people are now learning how to better game Digg. This has caused (at least for me) a noticeable drop in the quality of articles that hit the front page of Digg. This, combined with the influx of new “mainstream” users further lowers quality.

In short, Digg isn’t growing stronger due to its increased exposure: it is actually growing weaker. Proof? How about Digg’s traffic graph for the past six months:

In six months, Digg’s daily reach has fallen over 10%! How else can this be explained?

Kevin Rose talked about introducing a pictures or reviews section; these are not the solutions to this problem. The problem is that Digg is trying to appeal to everybody. It is trying to be the jack of all trades in news. It’s impossible.

What does Digg cover well? If you answer with “everything,” you just fell into the trap that Kevin Rose did. It covers nothing well. It doesn’t cover celebrity news as closely as tabloids. It doesn’t cover business development as closely any industry publication. It doesn’t cover Apple news as closely as Apple rumor blogs. It doesn’t cover politics as closely as the thousands of newspapers across the country.

The point is, Digg has scaling problems in the social sense. If it grows, it only covers more topics in less depth since front page space is always limited. As more users join, the collective opinion continues to “average out,” allowing more quality to slip through the cracks, especially on niche topics.

And this is why Digg is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Digg’s competitors are best to leave their news sites in their respective niches rather than branching out.