John, I remember when your post got Dugg, in addition to the digg effect, your site was also experiencing the “Zeldman effect”, so no wonder your server crushed ;-) I guess you’re right about cracking the digg secret of getting the diggs, but to me that doesn’t justify all those efforts, so I’m more like you – won’t be bothered to try it out.
And I too get more traffic from StumbleUpon lately.

Andrew, that’s how I feel looking at all those almost identically styled headlines on Digg. Is human psychology that simple that between a regularly titled article and the one that starts with “How To..”, “Top 10″, “Not to miss…” we’ll choose the latter ones? And yes, the negative comments there can get very scary.

Jacob, I was sure that your 99 resources article will get dugg. Looks like indeed the existence of top diggers as your friends is more essential, rather than a digg-targeted headline. But I’m sure you got lots of traffic from StumbleUpon where users appreciated your efforts in putting together all those resources.

David, the banning just confirms that Digg is nothing more than a social mafia that controls who gets dugg and who goes down. I can understand banning illegit spammers, but that’s not the case here.

Audee, I doubt that diggers, who care more about building their profiles on Digg, read much of their dugg articles. That’s why there are so many articles teaching us how to write effective, provocative, attractive headlines and start the articles with a bang – when someone diggs 100 articles in 2 hours, how is it possible to read them all?

Chris, thanks so much for your response. You’ve addressed my curiosity about getting too many requests to digg others’ articles once you achieve a certain rank as a digger.
You mentioned you prefer reddit over digg to get your news. Is it how you use reddit, just to read what’s popular there or are you submitting articles to reddit as well?

Social_news, I do hope your comment here was more than just a promotion of you.prescue. I did briefly visit that site, but didn’t find it all that attractive.

Ronald, yes, 34 diggs are not enough, even 77 diggs weren’t enough for Jacob’s article. I think with their recent algorithm changes, it takes a minimum of 100 diggs to get promoted to the front page.

The most I ever got was 34 diggs I believe. Definitely not enough.

I did have the privilege of burying my first comment the other day (oh the power, I know).

It almost seems like Diggers and Stumblers are opposites. Diggers love to put people down, while Stumblers love pulling people up.

They can generate decent traffic, and it is not that difficult to get to the sites front page at the moment.

The best part is, you don’t need to sign up to submit, vote or comment.

* Stumbleupon has given my site the most traffic by far, but I prefer using Safari most of the time instead of Firefox, so Stumbleupon isn’t something I check out all that often for personal use because its real usefulness without that toolbar is limited.

* I like to browse Reddit the most for news and other breaking events. The site feels much faster to me and the interface is pretty minimalist, which I like.

* My favorite one these days is Delicious, because there’s real personal value in storing and managing all the links I think I might need again.

“Is it so hard to add more categories to Digg?”

I don’t think it’s hard, it just becomes too unwieldy for the average person to check out if you make things too specific and have hundreds of categories instead of dozens. They have to work hard to get the balance just right.

“How difficult is it to check whether the submitting URL has already been stored in Digg’s database?”

If anybody knows the real answer to this I’d be pretty interested in finding this out, because it should be trivial. The only explanation that I can come up with that makes even the tiniest bit of sense is that they have multiple databases for scaling reasons and they get so many simultaneous submissions that they think they need that extra user check to try and doubly make sure that no duplicate links are submitted. But even that honestly doesn’t make too much sense.