hack text

In which I don't bother to asssign a subtitle.

Taking a look at popular posts among my peer group (college students, aged 17-25) shows that few of them share the same type of popularity on Digg that they do on other networks. Likely because these students have little interest in using Digg, even for a quick upvote.

To put it simply, Digg has voted itself out of the social ecosystem. The proof is right there on many of the stories I’ve been looking at lately.

Just look at Huffington Post’s first headline news story in their college section. The article is on student debt, perhaps the one topic universally important to the college-age market segment.

“Share Your Story — Majoring in Debt” was immensely popular, with 579 Facebook shares and 1,389 Tweets. The comment section on the site received 4,316 replies. But how many Diggs are there? 16.

This is clearly not a question of interest in the content. If all the people who had Facebooked and Tweeted the article had bothered to log on to Digg and vote, it would have blown up. But they didn’t. The reason is that Gen Y just doesn’t care about Digg.

The Digg community has recognizably been gamed by those with large networks and caters to a very niche user base, interested mostly in tech topics and anything that can amuse them. The irritating Digg bar doesn’t help either.

The perception (right or wrong) of the Digg community as clique-ish doesn’t sit well with college-age students who are aiming to build their own brands. I know very few of my fellow students who are fans of Digg. Those who are fall into that niche category of tech-addicted ultra-geeks.

In the meantime, the ever-growing community of regular students jumping onto social media have little interest in the mysteries of Digg mastery, instead following content where they live, on Facebook or Twitter.

The population growing up with the internet has no interest in Digg.

While a huge number of upvotes may be beneficial for an article, it is no longer representative of popularity. Instead, the shares of stories through the tools people use every day are what matter.

I, for one, wave a happy goodbye to an antiquated tool.