Digg vs. Slashdot (or, traffic vs. influence)
There's been lots of talk on the web lately about Digg being the new Slashdot. Two months ago, a Digg reader noted that according to Alexa, Digg's traffic was catching up to that of Slashdot, even though Slashdot has been around for several years and Digg is just over a year old.
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg enters this comparison barely a year old but already capitalized: the San Francisco startup launched in October 2005 around user-voted story rankings and raised $2.8 million from big-name investors within weeks. Two months before this piece, a Digg reader flagged that Alexa's numbers already had Digg's traffic closing on Slashdot's, an incumbent with several years' head start.
Kottke.org's framing — traffic versus influence — captures what the Alexa curve alone can't answer. The site's own take (offered as prediction, not fact) is that Slashdot fades in style during 2006 yet declines slowly because of its loyal following and momentum, which is precisely why raw visitor counts are an incomplete measure of where the tech crowd actually sets the agenda.
First-order effects
- Slashdot faces its first credible challenger for the same tech-early-adopter audience, and the contest is being scored publicly on Alexa panel data rather than on either site's own reporting.
- Digg's $2.8 million round gives it runway to scale voting infrastructure and community against an incumbent whose advantage is accumulated editorial trust, not technology.
Second-order effects
- Publishers deciding where to pitch stories now have to arbitrage two gatekeepers with different currencies — Slashdot's curated endorsement versus Digg's volume-driven spikes — since a hit on either produces very different referral profiles.
- Third-party traffic estimators like Alexa become the de facto referee for influence claims, raising the stakes on how their panels are read and quoted across the blogosphere.
Third-order effects
- If crowd voting sustains its growth curve, news gatekeeping shifts structurally from small editorial teams to aggregate user behavior, making 'traffic' and 'influence' separately priced commodities that media businesses and their investors track independently.
The trend: Crowd-voted aggregation is emerging as a challenger to editor-curated gatekeeping in tech news, forcing the industry to measure audience reach and agenda-setting power as distinct things.