For some reason I got swept up recently with the Digg and Reddit social bookmarking sites. The lure of thousands of people digging what I have to say got the better of me and I started submitting some of my own stories. Lame.
I know that there is no money to be gained from the viewers of these sites because they normally block ads or just ignore them. Still, there’s something about trying to reach as big of an audience as possible and it is so easy to submit a story that I got carried away.
It is exciting to submit the story and then watch 30-70 people come to the site over the next 12-24 hours. How much easier could it be? And when stories take off, the traffic is insane, so I hear. If I ever do write something that gets popular over there it will be interesting to see if my Go Daddy hosted website can survive and how much bandwidth really gets used.
Fortunately, before I got too carried away, one of the Digg users called me out saying:
Last time I checked, Digg was a news site, not a “link your lame blog” site. This isn’t even general science related. It’s full of assumptions, presumptions, and opinions.
There’s a reason your blog doesn’t get traffic as it is. Thumbs down.
Of course, I was pissed at first. But after thinking it over for a couple minutes I realized he was right and just doing his best to help protect Digg. If people continuously submit their own crap instead of articles that are actually interesting, then sites like Digg and Reddit will be worthless. There’s a reason Netscape is willing to pay the good submitters $1000/month to find good content. Good content brings eyeballs. People submitting their own websites is just more spam on the internet.
I decided that I do not want to be a part of any kind of spam. So, I made a promise to myself that I will not be submitting my own stories to any of the social bookmarking sites from now on. If you write something of your own that you’d like me to read, send me a link and if I like it, I will submit your good stories to Digg or Reddit.
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