The last few weeks have shown a dramatic decline of community participation in the popular social sharing site, Digg. The demise was noticed when Digg stop receiving over 40 million unique visitors to its site every month after its redesign. Visitors from the US declined by 26% and visitors from the UK by about 34%. Because of this extreme user decline, it currently only takes about 200 Digg users to get a story on the top 10.
Digg is beginning to stabilize the decline and has added many features that its visitors have asked for, but the overall activity level of people still visiting the site is noticeably down as well. What are users looking for, and how can user voting sites like Digg survive?
Continuing Forward
Digg’s redesign took about 18 months to finish and it was only in beta testing for two months. The preparations for the site obviously fell short for what was needed. Digg’s VIP of Product, Keval Desai stated, “We had a game plan, and clearly it did not go smoothly. In hindsight, there are several things that could have been done better.”
The complaints that they received indicated to Digg that they still had passionate users who are loyal to the site and want things to be fixed. Now, how will they regain the users that they once had before this fiasco?
Keeping in mind the average user and how they think and maneuver, Digg and other voting sites must keep up with the demand and trends that users are expecting. Digg is still trying to meet the needs of its users and publishers large and small who make the site what it is. Even though the redesign has caused a lot of upset and backlash, Digg has recently begun to see a slow increase in user activity again. Making changes according to the habits and desires of its users has helped Digg start to gain more traffic again, though slowly.
Changing With the Times
Another voting site, Sphinn.com, has gone in a different direction that may gain better acceptance than the commotion Digg’s redesign caused. Sphinn noticed a trending decrease in voting coupled with a tendency to “game” the voting system. As a solution, instead of letting users vote for the best articles and stories on the site, Sphinn has gotten rid of voting all together. They hope to bring discussions back to the forefront by letting users add comments and suggestions to stories and articles that have been published. This allows the user to have more of a say in what is being published, without forcing the voting model. This concept could be one direction for other voting sites to take.
Concluding Thoughts
With the ever-growing trend of users desiring greater personal expression online, we might see more discussion groups popping up as user participation models continue to evolve. The ability to discuss issues separately from submitting articles has been widely popular and seems to be coming to the forefront to meet the user demands. Perhaps other voting sites might head in this direction by providing users the ability to voice their opinion in different ways other than voting. Only time will tell what will truly happen to these voting sites, and for now, users have different options to choose from to express their opinions.
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