It was just a month or two ago, it seems, that it took 50-60 diggs to get front page. I remember even seeing posts in the 30-40 range get front page on occasion. Has the Digg userbase exploded that much lately? Traffic, if anything is down within the last few months, according to Alexa.
So what’s the deal? I’ve been tracking diggs in the upcoming section for a while now. The average now is for a story to need more than 100 diggs before going popular. Many stories need even more than that. I found two stories that hadn’t gone popular after 123 and 146 diggs respectively. And both of these stories came from top diggers. Here are shots:
I’m guessing that this has to be because of social media fraud, that’s running even more rampant now than it had been just a few months ago. SEOmoz even ran a story about it today, citing the "freebies" section over at DP as an example of people trading diggs, reddits, stumbles, etc. And those are just the people dumb enough to actually ask for diggs on a very high profile forum (ban-bait!). Looks like we’re just going to have to work even harder to come up with material that’s good enough to go viral.
Many users will remember the last time this happened in November, when they changed the algorithm to require more diggs, and we were surprised that we needed more 60 diggs to get popular. By next year at this time, I’m guessing we’ll need about 1,000 diggs to get popular.
