On August 25, 2010 Digg launched “Digg v4″; version 4 of the social networking site. Digg v4 fundamentally changed how the site functioned for its users leading to a long series of backlashes against the site.
By the end of September the bugs in the Digg v4 system had been worked and the articles about the “Great Digg Exodus” had all but ceased; I assumed everything had leveled out and the Digg community would slowly rebuild.
Yesterday on reddit, Alan Schaaf (the creator of imgur.com), did an AMA (ask-me-anything) with the community and user No-Shit-Sherlock asked:
Has Digg traffic dropped noticeably in recent months?
to which Alan responded:
To tell you the truth, it has. It used to be the #2 referrer, and it’s around 4 or 5 now.
This is an interesting ancillary data point given that imgur.com does over 2 billion image-views a month and roughly 300 TB of data a month; one of (if not the) largest image hosting sites out there could probably give a good indicator of traffic just like looking at the most popular link-shortening site or traffic analytics site could do the same.
I don’t think it’s the whole story, but it is an interesting data point. If we peek at Alexa and see what they think, the trend continues:
A massive dip in traffic right around August 25th with traffic of competing social networking sites spiking and rising steadily since then, especially reddit’s.
My own negative experiences with Digg forced me to look into other socialized news sites before the Digg 4 launch, but solidified my decision after the launch and all the problems that followed it up. In my own process I learned to love StumbleUpon (namely the iPad app) when it came to uncovering interesting data and still maintain a love-hate relationship with community-elitist sites like reddit.
