For those who have never heard of it, Digg.com is a social news website where users add and comment on various websites on the Internet with an emphasis on news. It was a pioneer in social news with its infamous voting structure, now copied on every other social news website on the planet. In simple terms, the more ‘diggs’ a story receives in a reasonably amount of time the better chance it has of reaching the front page, the pinnacle of all stories on Digg.

Despite it being known as a cutting-edge website Digg has existed for years, starting out as a technology resource. Back then it was fantastic for tech stories, with any industry news and articles sprouting up within minutes of being published. In short, if you wanted top-quality tech news fast Digg was the place to be.

Of course, like a lot of businesses Digg wanted to be bought out. Despite never really declaring their intentions Digg was, and still is desperate for someone to take the website off their hands for a large sum of money. The website moved to a wider focus, general news, where it aimed to keep the same standards for quality and breaking news as before. Sadly, this didn’t stick.

For the past year Digg has been an unbearable community and website. If users aren’t spamming articles on Barack Obama and Ron Paul then British newspapers like the Daily Mail are manipulating votes on their own stories to get traffic from Digg. In a few short years Digg has shifted from news website to traffic builder and altogether ‘funny-stuff-on-the-internet’ website. Website owners will Digg their own stories in an aim to get more traffic (myself included, so I can use the bandwidth I have and get one or two visitors out of it), with some going as far as to devise plans on how to manipulate Digg counts to ensure that their website always ends up on the front page, through methods such as assembling teams to Digg new stories. A website well-known for cashing in on the liberal frenzy of Digg is the Huffington Post, where ‘authors’ will write ‘news’ on how Barack Obama will appear in a technicolour dream-coat and will lead us all to the promised land.

As a news resource Digg died a very long time ago. Digg caters for an exclusive community nowadays, ranging from armchair political nuts, to gaming fanboys, to internet meme addicts. It’s very rare to see a news story break first on Digg anymore, and extremely rare to see any real news in the top stories of the day. However, for todays generation of Digg users quality news content is not the meal of the day. They come to Digg to be entertained, and their community can definitely offer that.

This is great for their die-hard community, but not for their owners and not for the large percentage of submitters.

As I mentioned before, the owners of Digg are desperate for acquisition. For a website that could easily become yesterdays news it’s a top priority to get rid of the website before this happens. Reddit has already stolen a lot of Digg’s thunder over the past couple of months and I don’t give it long before Reddit acquires a lot of Digg’s traffic. The problem for the owners of Digg is that as a news resource and community Digg has lost all focus and credibility. A news corporation would never buy Digg because of its political and internet dynamic, neither would a large technology website because of vast legal issues surrounding its controversial past. In itself, Digg is more comedy than news, with the same users and websites commonly getting large amounts of Digg’s.

For submitters a front-page placement on Digg was once the holy grail. To many people getting on the front page of the popular website would mean thousands of visitors reading your content, and this still rings true. The problem today is that webmasters have now realised that whilst adding a website to Digg isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the generated traffic is almost a bad thing. Who really wants thousands of users that will never visit again or click any ads? Much like with Stumbleupon you can receive vast amounts of traffic with little return as far as interaction and ad-clicks go, resulting in nothing but an inflated bandwidth bill or suspension of your account by your host. A lot of top-quality webmasters have caught onto the fact that social networks do not offer that much directed traffic and do not promote their links anymore, which will only result in a lack of quality stories on these social websites.

Whilst on the surface Digg appears to be a fully-functioning example of user-selected content, deeper in shows a potentially dangerous power-struggle involving the staff manipulating Digg themselves. Today, stories like this aren’t even noteworthy, because we all know that Digg is an inside job. In many ways it has to be, because in an online society where the loudest demand power a policing service needs that power. As a website it has become too volatile, with a lack of quality control and an emphasis on pleasing a community that’ll turn its back on the website the second something better comes along. In my honest opinion Digg as a social news website is dead. If I were one of the owners I would slap some heavy quality-control on the website, ban ALL abusive users, cap reoccuring websites and try to emulate the same content that brought in users a couple of years ago. If Reddit can keep a top-notch programming subsection going with its recent spurt of popularity then I’m sure Digg can gain quality content once again.