Digg is a total joke of a business & a waste of a few hundred milly if News Corp actually pays that absurd price.
Ok, so I haven’t busted out for a rant in a while. It’s something that’s actually quite a liberating thing. Why not express exactly what you think, unfiltered based on what you expect other people to read, or what is most consumable, or whatever other frankly BS constructs that limit your creativity or expressiveness? Throwing that to the wind, starting now…
So Digg. Rumors has it News Corp wants to pony up hundreds of millions for it. But why? Sure, I’m about to say something you might think is unoriginal. It’s true that many people have harshly criticized Digg for being overly dependent on particular people posting. But just because people have said that before, doesn’t mean it should be dismissed. In fact, I’m saying it’s one of the only points that really matters. Fact is, Digg is a joke, way overly dependent on small percent of users contributing the content.
Problem is it’s run amok. Whereas Wikipedia can have quality controls, somebody like Digg is just let loose with garbage. There’s literally no control. There are no standards. Know what happens when that happens? What you get is filth. You get lowest common demoninator.
Now, it’s not as if Digg hasn’t thought of that exact eventuality. Fact is they do a pretty good job with their up/down mechanisms for separating crap from the real stuff. But that can only take you so far. Still, it takes a user to actually vote in order to make a difference. But what happens when all the posts are clearly horrible? What when the people voting in fact are not necessarily the right people you want voting? Maybe they vote up comments that are actually not that good? And who is to say what they vote up is necessarily what people care about at all? Yes, that’s right, there’s no telling that. At all. NONE.
What happens is Y! Message Boards. This whole thing has happened before. When you have anonymous people being drawn to a site with a ton of traffic, you end up with a bunch of garbage happening. You get people posting stuff you know really shouldn’t be. You get people trying to game the system b/c they want a piece of the action that goes along with a high traffic site. Garbage, garbage, garbage. Filth.
Again, at least Wikipedia has some standards to figure out what’s right. This is a dramatic oversimplification of the standards in place at Wikipedia, but leave it at this: truth. Ok, the word “truth” in itself inspires a whole rash of definitions, which in itself is a whole shitstorm, so set aside your conceptions about what “truth” is, and at least acknowledge there’s a whole hell of a lot better brightline for something like Wikipedia, where it’s fact-based, and something like Digg, where the headlines are literally designed in order to attract attention.
Here’s another thing. Remember that techcrunch post last week (whenever it was, you think I’m actually going to go find it and link to it? Not gonna happen, this whole post is straight up stream of consciousness and it’s going to be posted that way, errors and all, minus the easy MS Word spellchecker, which you gotta use, ignoring of course the slang I’m using b/c I feel like it). Anyways, that post, it was about YouTube, and how you can game the system. The guy has actually done it before. First of all, bravo. I think he has a great business, and I applaud it. I think it’s a joke that some observers said they were “shocked” to hear it. Please. That’s what happens. There’s a business opportunity. I encourage those people to capitalize. And it’s not ethically wrong at all. The service is basically helping design videos that are more consumable. In other words, it’s understanding the type of content users wants, and telling the big media companies who haven’t figured it out how to do it. That’s a great damn service!
Anyways, to the big point I’m trying to make: YouTube kinda gets gamed. But please, it’s NOTHING like how Digg gets gamed. Digg is like YouTube if the only videos on YouTube that got watched were the ones in the “most popular” section. Makes no damn sense. There’s no damn long tail. YouTube at least has stuff people want to see that gets spread around thanks to email chains. But for Digg? Not so fast, not gonna happen, it plain sucks in comparison.
Ok, so how the hell does this relate to my original point, that Digg is a joke, doesn’t deserve a multi-hundred milly valuation and doesn’t have a sustainable business model? It does relate, and in a big way. Here’s the problem: If you’re dependent on your front page to draw in users, and you don’t substantially benefit from a long-tail, then you are really damn dependent on that. That’d be ok if you’re Yahoo and you have a bunch of highly sustainable properties like Yahoo Mail and shit sending you traffic every damn day. But if you’re Digg, it’s a weakness. ON TOP OF THAT, the weakness gets compounded by the fact I mentioned above that NOT ONLY are they dependent on the front page to entice READERS to their page, they are super dependent on the people who actually SUBMIT content and vote. Shit dude, that’s a dependency on top of a dependency. Factor in the huge historical disadvantages running against them, namely that when anonymous people get together online and there’s traffic, all hell breaks loose and no value is created, then you know you have a serious problem.
Ok, gotta at least give credit to Digg for riding the coattails of Fb to a nice little guaranteed (at least I assume it’s guaranteed) ad deal with MSFT. Prob doesn’t cost MSFT a damn thing, but props up the financial condition of Digg in the meantime, perhaps providing sufficient confusing propping up for News Corp to foolishly purchase them.
Damn, this post is getting long and my hands are starting to hurt, but I just remembered something I should probably point out, b/c it’s relevant to the fact that Digg could get really lucky here. It’s about how desperate News Corp is to make a purchase. Think about it. First they hit a quadruple grand slam by buying MySpace and riding out its success, WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING beyond buying it. Now of course, they’re f’ing it up completely, as demonstrated by their sagging US traffic (and I don’t mean a temporary blip, I mean a legitimate significant decrease in traffic that is non-reversible and permanent).
Ok, just made a new paragraph for no reason other than the last one was getting a little long winded. Anyways, the POINT: News Corp is desperate to bump their traffic, Digg’s high unique visitor count would let them “declare victory” on having a huge number of unique visitors they connect to, but WITHOUT actually giving them a sustainable business worth a shit. So in other words, the purchase would be more about justifying the jobs of the people at News Corp in Fox Interactive, temporarily getting a PR boost b/c they can add the unique visitor count to their total, and foolishly buying into whatever propped up revenue they’re getting now.
Phew, ok that was nice. Anyways, that’s what I really think. I don’t mean to offend anyone. I figure no one reads this blog anyway, so I might as well say what I really think. But what do you think? Please let me know, I’d appreciate it. It would actually be pretty neat if posting something like this – long-winded, pretty much unedited (actually, a lot unedited, I’m talking just spell check edited), and without thorough research other than what I just think is going to happen, would turn out to be worthwhile reading for at least a few people. I don’t mean a ton of people, but at least a few people who might really care about getting that sort of opinion. My hope then is that this is a pretty differentiated style of writing.
So, please send me your feedback. Until then, this is Mr. Wall signing out.
