As someone who spends an unhealthy amount of the workday on Digg there are a few mind-boggling trends I’ve noticed. Certain stories seem to pretty much guarantee several comments that are nothing more than variations on “Really? That made the front page?” but they still seem to get consistently dugg up by a large number of people.
Slideshows
It is unlikely at this point that anyone could click through to an AskMen or Forbes.com list without knowing they’re about to endure another painful eye-raping in the name of page views. But still, these one sentence per page lists seem to perform reasonably well, despite a comments section riddled with complaints and an almost guaranteed 100+ diggs to the first person willing to copy the list over in a simple, easy to read format. For other offenders see EW and Maxim.
Huffington Post
For the past several months Digg’s 2008 U.S. Elections category has been redirecting people straight to the Huffington Post. Despite a fair amount of backlash in threads like this and this the Huffington Post has continued its total dominance of all things political.
Web Comics
There’s about a 50 percent chance that any given XKCD comic will have several comments whining about how it seemingly rockets to the front page no matter what, an inevitable link to http://www.isxkcdshittytoday.com/ and a few people simply stating “not funny.” However, there’s an almost equal chance that any other web comic that finds its way to the front page will end up getting called out for being “a cheap knockoff of XKCD.” So, if you want to make the front page, but also get people to tell you how much you suck, make a web comic.
Cracked Lists
Cracked.com is pretty much the Huffington Post of comedy, assuming the Huffington Post’s shameless stealing of NBC’s content doesn’t already qualify it for the title.
Although at least some of their lists can miraculously fit on one page, it seems like the bulk of them are just too funny to be contained on anything less than two. Either way, Cracked gets nearly a list a day on the front page even though a fair amount of them are met with intense, well thought out criticism like the following “That was dumb.”
Mr. BabyMan
This one probably ties in with the a larger category of duplicate submissions, since stealing submissions seems to be treated like the crime to end all crimes. But despite this, Mr. BabyMan continues to drive through a puddle and splash mud all over the weak submissions of us common-folk on his way straight to the home page. However, for the amount of rancor this guy has to put up with I’d say he’s allowed a free pass on stealing whatever the hell he wants. Now would you mind submitting something for me Mr. BabyMan?
Verbatim Comments
Watching a video and then putting a direct quote from the exact same video in the comments section of said video shouldn’t really be rewarded with diggs. And usually you can count on someone to point out that this is a pretty lame thing to do. However, almost without fail, this comment will be given a noteworthy amount of diggs, despite the fact that it contributed pretty much nothing more than some instant nostalgia. For examples see almost every Zero Punctuation review ever.
Rick Rolls
Actually…diggers love Rick Rolls more than they love Ron Paul giving the finger to the RIAA while downloading music onto a Mac.
