A lot of people use social news sites like Digg, Reddit, DZone, HN, Slashdot blah blah blah, and I mean a lot! The basic premise of these sites is to allow users to contribute by submitting news articles, and the community then votes these up (or down in some cases), promoting the articles with the hope that more votes equal a quality article.
The holy grail for submitters like myself of these articles is usually to get onto the homepage of that site, giving your article maximum exposure. “The Digg Effect” for example is a well known term which ultimately means your article got onto the homepage, andHammertime ensued… Hammertime being a few thousand hits in a very short space of time. Back in the early days of Digg (arguably, when content was of a little more quality than nowdays) it wasn’t unusual for a article to get promoted to the homepage, and The Digg Effectbringing the hosting server to its knees.
Nowdays though, The Digg Effect has little impact on the sites that make it to the Digg homepage. Most articles are from well established web properties, usually with a hosting backbone to support Hammertime with scope for more, yet people persist in submitting their articles to the likes of Digg with the vague hope of some homepage action. Digg are now starting to goto lengths to try and facilitate getting this kind of content back onto the homepage, so I thought I’d explain here how Digg and similar sites probably do this.
