Digg Just Might Bury Slashdot
A hot new social-bookmarking site is deluging web servers all over the net with a tsunami of traffic — and is starting to make Slashdot-size waves. — Digg, a San Francisco news site compiled by its own readers, lists links to interesting new technology articles.
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg launched in October 2005 as a service that ranks stories according to what users like across the web, and it secured $2.8 million in venture funding. That combination gave a reader-curated technology-link site resources to scale just as its referrals were becoming consequential for publishers.
The immediate significance is not merely another tech-news destination: Digg turns collective voting into a distribution mechanism capable of concentrating audience attention on individual links, challenging the referral role associated with Slashdot.
First-order effects
- Sites featured prominently on Digg face abrupt surges of incoming visitors, making server capacity an immediate operational issue for smaller technology publishers.
- Digg competes directly with Slashdot for technology readers and for the ability to determine which newly published links receive concentrated attention.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and site operators have a stronger incentive to make pages resilient to referral spikes, because a community vote can rapidly become a traffic event.
- Technology writers and publishers gain a new gatekeeper alongside editor-led link sites: Digg users' collective selections influence which stories reach a large audience.
Third-order effects
- If reader-ranked link sites continue to scale, web discovery shifts from a small set of editorial curators toward platforms whose users collectively allocate attention.
- The resulting concentration of referral traffic makes ranking systems and their communities a meaningful part of publishers' distribution infrastructure.
The trend: Online news discovery is moving toward community-ranked links, where user voting can create both editorial influence and sudden referral traffic.