

Digg Overtakes Facebook with 1400% Growth, 22.6 Million Uniques - hodgesmr
http://dcurt.is/digg-overtakes-facebook-with-1400-growth-226-million-uniques

======
vlad
Very misleading quote. The full article features disbelief about Compete.com
numbers, so it seems as much a critique of Compete.com as it does a story
about Digg.

Since I ended up reading the article, I have to wonder if Compete counted Digg
buttons on blogs as visits. Facebook, of course, did not even get a Share/Like
button until 2.5 years later in late 2009
(<http://mashable.com/2009/10/26/facebook-share-buttons/>) It would be easy to
get millions of daily uniques if popular newspapers all request your script or
image in every article, and sites like Compete don't properly take social
buttons into account.

(It's interesting that recent articles have debated if Facebook itself now
counts the display or click of a Like button as a visit.)

------
therealarmen
It's a fun exercise, but we all know how reliable Compete is for quantitative
traffic comparisons. For example, Compete currently claims Reddit
(<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/>) has less traffic than Digg
(<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/>).

I sincerely doubt Digg surpassed Facebook's traffic at any point in the
company's lifetime.

~~~
jedberg
Compete just makes numbers up. Those uniques are so far off for reddit it
isn't even funny.

~~~
oconnor0
That's a very strong claim. What evidence do you have for it?

~~~
azylman
Probably that whole "being one of the original members of the Reddit team"
thing.

But, you know, I could be wrong.

~~~
oconnor0
Ah, yes, thanks, that isn't obvious. No need to be snotty about it.

~~~
Pewpewarrows
His HN profile immediately talks about running Reddit's servers. And he's
using the same recognizable username. I don't know how more obvious it could
have been.

~~~
criveros
Why would you check someone's profile?

~~~
nicholassmith
Because in general when someone says something similar you background check
their profile to see if they're for real or a crazy.

------
jere
Is anyone else hoping to read the same article in 5 years but about Facebook?

~~~
zalew
that guy using diaspora (I've heard of him, he must exist somewhere)

------
carsongross
It's a crazy world out there, kids:

<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1850428>

Try not to let it bother you too much.

------
mkramlich
This re-emphasizes one of my own personal rules of entrepreneurship: when
someone offers you a FU money exit, and you don't already have FU money, you
take it. You take it and walk. Because if you don't, you might regret it, and
who knows what the future will bring. After you reach FU money, it's not like
you can't go and try building another new product/service/website/gadget again
-- you can, except you'll be starting from a much safer and happier place,
with more resources, connections, eyeballs, etc.

~~~
unreal37
I think Kevin Rose is doing OK. He has FU money.

------
dredmorbius
Sic transit gloria lacinia felis.

------
ck2
Wasn't it the redesign that started the avalanche of people leaving?

Or am I mistaken? Maybe if they had just left it alone and did gradual tweaks
instead...

~~~
notatoad
No maybe about it. Digg lost their market by messing with their product. It's
an interesting case, because you can make a direct comparison with reddit: two
nearly identical products serving the same market started at the same time.
Digg tried to grow too fast and failed, reddit grew at its natural pace and
succeeded.

~~~
dmix
I don't know... I was part of a big migration to reddit around 2008-2009.

I remember there being tons of threads on Reddit of ex-diggers making fun of
Digg around then. There were frequent posts daily about the complete
degradation of quality on Digg back then.

The running joke was all the posts on Digg's current frontpage were from
Reddits frontpage yesterday.

The redesign (in 2010) was the nail in the coffin.

~~~
notatoad
I was on reddit for a couple years before that. The jokes about digg's quality
certainly didn't begin in 2008.

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dennisgorelik
More recent data shows nosedive:

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/>

~~~
rhizome
No no no...they "adjusted their conversion factors."

~~~
rhizome
woops, there were errors returned from the server at the time.

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marcamillion
In the blink of an eye, in internet years.

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dangerboysteve
What a total BS blog post with no real data

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rdg
Really? In which parallel universe?

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earino
As I see it the basic problem was one of name. Who wants to be a digger? It
sounds fancy pants to be a redditor.

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sukuriant
Fascinating to see Digg coming back from the grave, so to speak. I didn't see
this coming.

Er... Fascinating to see such an old article come up on Hackernews without the
age of the article in parenthesis.

That's a derp.

~~~
christiangenco

        Richard Macmanus, at ReadWriteWeb, on June 20th, 2007:

~~~
sukuriant
Or ... not!

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VictorZ
Go ahead. Rub it in.

