Remember the Digg effect? It was the second major moniker for a tidal wave of traffic (the Slashdot effect was first).
The tidal wave was caused, of course, by a massive community that shared links. When one became popular and reached the home page, thousands upon thousands of surfers would flood a website … resulting in much the same effect as the barbarian hordes descending on Rome: servers would melt down in flames.
In response, of course, everyone who wanted traffic and thought that sort of disaster was a nice problem to have put the Digg button on their site … one of the first (after Technorati, I think) social sharing buttons on the web.
However, after multiple community upheavals, redesigns, and months of dithering, Digg’s traffic dropped significantly last year. And it isn’t coming back.
Which was fairly obvious from this:
This is just a random TechCrunch post, but see the numbers:
- Digg: 5 diggs
- Twitter: 818 tweets
- Facebook: 167 likes
- Google Buzz: 100 shares
Only 5 diggs!
In other words, Digg is increasingly less relevant. As site owners notice and start to remove it from their preferred social bookmarking buttons, this will only increase.
RIP Digg. You dug the hole.