Shoot Different

I read a post on this blog yesterday, and it left me dumbfounded.  Apparently, this poor guy got to the front page of digg with one of his posts.  He was on a shared hosting account on pair, one of the bigger, more reliable, and definitely highly recommended hosting providers.  He received this email from them:

Hello,

It appears nsharp.org is on the Digg.com frontpage.

Unfortunately traffic to this site had to be firewalled, as it was overwhelming the server and caused the server to become unresponsive.

We will only be able to lift this block when traffic to this site has significantly decreased. We appreciate your understanding in this matter.

If you have any questions, please let us know.

Thank You,

[name removed]
pair Networks, Inc.
http://www.pair.com

This is wrong on so many levels.  They obviously know how much of a big deal it is to get digg front page.  Yet, instead of calling the customer and trying to work out a solution, or moving him to a dedicated server temporarily, and then trying to upgrade him later, they just pulled the plug.

It’s a shame he wasn’t running any ads on his site, or he could have said that they lost him ad revenue and filed a claim.

He was taking all the necessary precautions, too.  It had been wordpress blog, and he replaced it with a static HTML page to try to ease the load.  The traffic he received was well within his monthly limits, albeit all within an hour or two.  Crazy stuff. 

I have a godaddy hosting account that costs me $15 a month, and it was able to handle getting dugg.  And to top it all off, this guy is now on a free wordpress-hosted site, and they’re more than happy to handle the load for him after the digg-effect.  Let me repeat that.  His current hosting is FREE, and they can handle it.

Great job, pair.

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.