My name is Karol Krizka, and I am a undergraduate student at SFU where I study physics and computer science. In my free time, I write simple applications and play with my PSP.Why The Digg Shout Is Not Good Advertising
Ever since Digg announced the recent changes to their website, people have been leveraging one of its features, the shout, to spam other users. The situation is so out of control that even my old account, that has been banned, receives around 5 shouts from all my friends every day. For some time, I also though that this is a great technique to promote my stories, but I was terribly wrong as the following screenshot shows.
As you can see, my stories recieve a lot of diggs, however they are never popular. This is because Digg uses an algorithm that looks at both diggs and buries. That’s right, if people think that your story is spam, then they will bury it. That is why you should not create a enormous list of friends, and just shout your story to all of them. They will just perceive you as a spammer, and mark your story as such. In most cases this will also result in your domain being banned from Digg.
Instead I suggest that you read and digg your friends’ stories. This way you show them that their work (digging your stories) will be rewarded. You can also facilitate this reciprocal digging by using several readily available tools, like my Friendly Digger.
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I agree that the shout feature is overused by a lot of people, but I think it can be effective if you use it only in rare occasions. I have only “shouted” once, and it was the only submission I’ve ever had that made it to the front page.
I am the founder of video game blog site http://www.ripten.com, and while my blog as well as many others rely on digg to help our sites gain awareness, I agree that the implementation of digg’s “shout” feature is prone to spam like usage.
The sites posters and diggers have a responsibility to themselves and each other to not abuse the system. Beyond that, we should support this story and hopefully the management at Digg will take some of the feedback to heart and enable filters to remedy the problems caused by the individuals who insist on abusing the system and the site.
Chad Lakkis
http://www.ripten.com
My question is: what is the *intended* use of the Shout system? The only Shouts I’ve ever received have been Digg-begging (spamming).
Seems like the only use of shout is to spam.
Friendly Digger sounds like a good tool, but I like to discover new content from newer submitters when I Digg what my friends Dugg too. That said, can you expand the tool to give the ability to Digg stories that friends have Dugg? (And can you add the username of the Digger/submitter to the story itself?)
I suppose that will work on 2 views (friends submitted and friends Dugg). I think that would be awesome.
[...] have been many who have condemned Digg’s shout mechanism as a spam tool; however, I have found a way to live with [...]