Despite the fact that I’ve been blogging for over three years now, the past two days have been a unique experience for me. For the first time in my blogging career, one of my posts made the front page of Digg. Truthfully, this isn’t the big accomplishment that it used to be as many bloggers make it there in their first few months of blogging, but this post isn’t about that. Instead I wanted to post about my experience being on the front page of Digg.
Funny thing is, the post that was Dugg was our best 3-Column WordPress Themes gallery, which was actually published on October 2, 2007. In that post, we featured our favorite 3-column WordPress themes in a gallery format for people to look through and find a suitable theme for their WordPress blog. This of course was before any of the premium WordPress themes or content management themes we have today. After I noticed the post was on Digg’s front page, I decided to revisit this post and noticed how “2007″ it was. WordPress has grown a lot since then and the quality of themes has really grown with it, making many of these themes really look outdated.
Anyway, I digress. It was Sunday afternoon before I realized WP Hacks had crashed due to being on the front page of Digg and it took a few hours before I tracked down the reason why and got the site back up and running. Once that was figured out I decided to dig through the Digg comments (pun intended) and was surprised with what I found:
1) Surely not the “best” themes out there.
Even though some look good, the others are really… well, insignificant.2) Is it just me or are all of these comments ridiculous? This has become very common on posts like this where they are a ‘best of’ list. My guess is someone is paying people to digg their article and make it FP.
3) Wow, someone just randomly grabs a heap of themes with no discernible consistency of quality at all, jams a bunch of screen shots together into a blog post, then by virtue of having dug every submission of of anyone in his list of ‘friends’ in the last six months, gets this propelled to front page. Then he logs in his army of fake accounts and makes a bunch of comments about his own post.
4) These aren’t that great, and all of these comments look like spam . . .
Seriously?!? I wasn’t even aware this post had been Dugg for almost 24 hours and suddenly I have an army of accounts and I have friends digging for me? Is it not possible for people to legitimately make the front page of Digg these days? I guess I don’t use Digg enough these days to know the “rules for getting to the front page.” With that said, probably the funniest part is this post being close to a year and a half old, yet people act like it was a fresh post showing current themes.
Anyway, for years now I’ve never really focused on Digg traffic and I think the comments above show why. It is simply a rush of traffic which is usually not targeted to your niche topic, so there is little chance of converting them into readers. Why exactly would someone want their post on the front page of Digg? The only potential benefits I can think of are incoming links I suppose. Otherwise it is more of a hassle than anything.
So, what are your thoughts on Digg? Do you still use it?
Oh, and to our new readers, if you’re looking for a new WordPress theme, here are a few updated theme galleries we’ve made:
Kyle Eslick
Kyle Eslick is the founder and primary author of WordPress Hacks. You can learn more about him at KyleEslick.com or you can follow his personal tweets here.
Nice, best post I found on the subject.
If you add code of a full page template using your code ...
best collection 
Does anyone have problem after updating? in my case, my Visitor map doesn't work well after updating >.< 
very nice theme, but what exactly means wp 2.7 ready? is it compatible with the newest version of wordpress? get ...
14 feature in theme looks quite interesting but yet have problem on SEO with some theme of Wordpress. 
Nicen themes, good work :) 
Wow, that was really weird. I was leaving a comment, an a new post just popped up!
I don’t know, I don’t really use digg, and people do submit my stories, but they’ve never made the front page. I do think that people just digg stories for the hell of it, and it’s a pain in the butt when servers crash because of it, and people are making stupid comments.
I guess it could be a win/loose situation. I don’t think it’s for everyone though for sure.
I have noticed that before. Digg seems to be mostly a bunch of whinny wannabes. I really wonder how much of that traffic you get is the quality traffic the brings you more regular visitors and how many just look at the article/item and never come back. I usually ignore the comments and look at the article/item that a friend dugg. I rarely visit digg anymore.
That’s all Digg is these days. I’ve for a long time subscribed to the Technology feed, but the headlines aren’t as good as they used to be, and 70% of the commenters are trolls. (Especially in the Apple stories. Darn, is it so hard to turn the Apple category off if you don’t like the company?)
So I’ve been visiting Digg a lot less lately, and I don’t care nearly as much about getting dugg anymore either.
I struggle to get anything interesting to read from Digg for a long time (stopped visiting and kept RSS feeds to few topics).
So as blogger I won’t be using service that I don’t consider useful.
I am on Digg, but really haven’t seen the advantages yet of being on the frontpage. Next to the fact that I don’t blog in English (yet) there really is no point for me to wanting to be on Digg. I much rather be on Stumble Upon or Delicious…
Yeah, I think that being on Stumble Upon, Newsvine, or Delicious is better than being on Digg!
“Why exactly would someone want their post on the front page of Digg?”
I’ve always wondered that, too. There’s a find line between the wisdom of crowds and the stupidity of herds, but I think Digg consistently crosses it. Thanks for posting this.
You totally deserve a digg FP, Kyle! I was featured on digg FP too, and experienced stupids comments like this. But who cares, For ten people who make stupid comments, you surely have something like 100 new readers.
Only the unknown are criticised. For those interested, I wrote a post about how negative comments can be good for your blog.
I was thinking….I guess making the front page of Digg is like making the front page of any popular website or blog. I got a couple of my posts featured on Destructoid and Kotaku, but I think it helped me gain readers, and encouraged people to comment.
@Jean: Nice post!
Congratulations for your digg success. I always look for 3 or 2 and 3 column combination blog template for me new blogs. Maybe, you can do a poll, of your visitors preferred type of template to find out the preferred template type.
Hey Kayle I submitted your post there on Digg and I loved your blog…Though I wanted to submit two successive post but two regular FP’s are kinda bad..;)
Don’t worry the kinda contains you have another submission will be a FP
I had a similair experience with reddit and they are almost the same crowd. Their like seagals: they come in a big crowd, shit all over the place and leave.
I
Many of them don’t return again and are not ‘our’ target audience at all. Their fire and forget visitors.
However for some types of sites/blogs their just ideal, like failblog, lolcats etc. So if you should actually target this audience with your blog/site…than you may actually benefit from them after all.