Digg Does It Right
June 1, 2009 by Mike Nally
Filed under Featured
I’m no longer a heavy user of the social news website Digg.com. I was a fairly active Digg supporter just a few years ago. There are a couple of reasons why my visits have become less frequent, I do still digg stories from time to time, but it’s mostly because I don’t feel like the culture of the Digg community matches my personality that well anymore.
Slow, managed, evolutionary growth is a key factor for Kevin Rose and Digg.com's continued success.
Given that, I’d still like to take this opportunity to commend the management team at Digg.com for not allowing their service to be swept up by the mainstream pop-culture and morphed and twisted into something it was never meant to be.
Having watched what has happened to Facebook and Twitter over the last 180 days I applaud founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson for keeping to their vision of what their site should be. The vision has evolved over the years no doubt but they have allowed the service to grow naturally, slowly, and with the customer’s needs in the forefront of their minds with nearly every decision.
What makes Digg.com a continuing success is that they’re more than willing to lose me as a user. They haven’t tried to become something that appeals to everyone. They don’t want to be all things to all people. They’ve found a niche, a social link sharing service that appeals primarily to young men, and have ridden that horse for some time with a decent level of success.
Facebook can hardly say that they’ve remained focused on their core users and we’re starting to witnessing the early days of the same failure visiting Twitter.
That Ashton and Demi are threatening to stop using Twitter if a reality television show is launched based on the service is all the information I need to realize that Twitter is currently in mid-air and the shark is right below them. Whether the television show idea is bogus or not isn’t the point. That a service like Twitter has spun so far out of control as to warrant such a conversation means that the core base of users are soon to find themselves on the outside looking in.
Congratulations to Digg.com and to all their users. You may not be for me anymore but you should be proud of what you have.
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Cover photo provided by Affiliate
