I saw a blog post on the Digg “Technology” home page that interested me. The content raised flags with me so I wanted to check out the rest of the site to see what to make of it. What I found was… interesting. Take a look at the articles listing for yourself:

• Five reasons to build your own PC [ November 26, 2006 ]
• Eight reasons why Ubuntu is the Linux poster child [ November 26, 2006 ]
• How to avoid spyware [ November 25, 2006 ]
• Ten reasons why every programmer should learn C [ November 25, 2006 ]
• Why it is now the time to switch to Linux [ November 24, 2006 ]
• Six reasons why the Zune will fail [ November 24, 2006 ]

For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s known as “Digg bait.” The site Jubling.com apparently is producing content geared to satisfy the formulaic requirements known to be successful on social news sites and is promoted through Digg by the user Jubs. I’m not trying to make this a story about Jubs - he appears to be a reasonably good Digg citizen, digging various stories (though not commenting). I do the same thing from time to time - submit content from this site that I think might become popular - so I can’t very well make something out of that.

What this story is about is the type of content that manages to make it to the front page of Digg (There was not a single reference or citation in the Jubling story and the assertions that are made aren’t backed up). And since this is about the type of content that makes it to the front page of Digg, this is also about Digg. The Digg model seems to be failing us. Look critically at the content appearing on the front page of Digg and you’ll see more and more of these types of sites and stories - light in substance and quality.

What is the point of these sites? Traffic spikes can be very profitable to sites that run advertising. I estimate that the number of diggs a story gets only indicates 2%-5% of the total traffic that is sent to the site from Digg. A site with 1200 diggs, then could really be seeing between 24,000 and 60,000 hits. Including traffic from Reddit and any of the dozens of other sites, the burst of traffic could mean hundreds of dollars to the owner of the site.

With real profit potential in Digg it becomes tempting to post for the sake of Digg and not for the sake of content - and many aren’t above such temptation. I wouldn’t expect individuals to not take advantage of opportunities, especially since they appear to be working, but I will assert that Digg is fueling something that is counter to the interests of the users and the users are largely ignorant of what’s happening.

Is there better way? Slashdot is the site most commonly compared to Digg - it uses editorial processes to discriminate good content for the users and earned user trust. Perhaps Is there a hybrid model that takes some of the best of both models? I certainly hope so - for the sake of the Internet, we’ve got to be able to do better than Digg.