Blog-a-torium
Monday, September 22, 2008
Digg Uproar: The Future of Digg?
I ran across an article on TarMac101 about the future of Digg and I as I was going through the names of the fallen comrades and reflecting upon the articles the blog linked to, I asked myself "What is the future of Digg?"
I noticed on Ashmadai's site that one person who replied called for the banning of Digg, now I have read the things this man has uploaded to the net for weeks now and he does have a sense of humor... but what if he is serious. Let's pull a Pinky and the Brain on this one and ponder this issue seriously.
To start out our little scenario.... let's say MrBabyman, Zaibatsu, MSaleem and MakiMaki have grown wearisome of Digg. They get together and decide to open their own social content site, but they also want to do it smart and use a front man to do most of the mundane work and run interference. So they form a coalition of silent partners and choose a person willing to act as 'the big cheese"... let's say they pick someone like Ashmadai who has no real affiliations and has a really big mouth at times. :) The five get together and work out a plan for the daily running of the site. A moderately small set of rules and guidelines are set up and the policies for running the forum are laid out. So Ash gets to work on putting this all in action.
The next thing they want is promotion, maybe they will talk to another guy with a big mouth, who has his finger on the pulse of the net. They choose someone like Chris Lang to set up the promoting of this new site.
The third thing they do is set up a team of technical people to insure everything runs smoothly on the site, maybe they ask Diggboss and a few other people who know coding to do this.
The Top 4 (MrBabyman, Zaibatsu, MSaleem and MakiMaki) can work as much or as little on this as they wish, but after they set up things the way they want - they can simply allow their "People" to do their magic and then come back and approve what they see before opening the forum up to the general public. In the meantime, the top 4 can basically choose other names for themselves and list those names as the owners and such. This frees up their normal handles to simply post, vote, comment and in general be 'just another user" of the forum.
We should realize that the set-up isn't this simple, but let's just move on through all of the minor details and get to the point that the forum is now open for business. The Top 4 has plenty of followers on Digg, and elsewhere, it can be made known that these 4 people found this 'forum' and fell in love with it because it's brand new and wide open. Instantly the forum ought to bring in thousands of users, and by instantly I mean within the first couple of weeks. The posting of items to this new forum might be slow at first, but it can build if the Top 4 and many of their followers would take the time to be active there. Additionally the site can be promoted, sort of on the quiet side, as an alternative to Digg. The attempt to draw in everyone banned from Digg could bring in thousands more. Around the time the first month rolls around, the site could rank high in the search engine rankings, which will bring in more people. The place could grow like wildfire.
Many Diggers don't have broadband, so the serious attempt could be made to set the site up so that those on dial-up have an easier time in using the site. The advertising on the site would be basic ads, for the most part, and the selling gimmick to the advertisers lies in approximately half the net is using dial-up, despite what some articles lead one to believe. Our aim is to show their products in such a way that it doesn't slow down these low speed users much. This could be a big hit if done right, especially in these times when people are finding it hard to find the money to put gas in their cars or keep their homes.
Alright, that lays out the idea... now how many people do you think this site could pull? Let's say the Top 4 can bring in 1,000 members combined by the end of the first week. Some of those thousand users will promote the site for free, simply because they like the Top 4 or because they want to suck up to them. Never underestimate the power of the suck-up. :) If 250 of the 1,000 brings in 2 people, that means that by the end of the second week there will be 1,500 people on the new site. The site could easily have 3000 people by the end of the month, but I think that is a low figure. Once the people on Digg find out about the site, those disgruntled with Digg would try the new site. That could be 5,000 to 10,000 people easy, if Digg has between 5 and 25 million individual members.
I'll let you toy with this idea further, perhaps some of you can come up with better figures.
