This isn't surprising at all. In fact, I met and worked with someone on an unrelated contract who ran a small shop that did just this. It made me happy I stopped using digg years ago.
Digg could have solved a lot of these problems early on by introducing a couple very simple features: first, allow users to block domains, and second, allow users to block users. I can't remember how many times cracked.com or holytaco.com would show up on the frontpage and make me cringe. Reddit is starting to suffer from the same thing.
The fundamental problem with Digg and also with Reddit somewhat is that nobody wants to sit and curate the upcoming stories, and upcoming stories require far too many votes to catch steam and have a chance at hitting the front page. So it falls to a small handful of power users who have a network of friends built up who are willing to vote on their stories.
Digg essentially became an aggregator of cheap, popcorn content; the kind of stuff non-tech savvy people forward around on email.
Hacker News is still good because it's a small niche of highly tech-savvy people, but if it gets to popular it will run into the exact same issues.
I think the new Digg is actually a good step in the right direction. The truly best way to get good content is to decide yourself where it comes from. I get my best links from Twitter because I follow people who are interested in the same stuff I am. If I could define my network, the content would remain relavent. I think it would take around 500-5000 people to really generate great content, provided those people are all people you align with well.
Digg's main problem is it left the technology niche and became mainstream. The same thing has happened with lots of forums I used to frequent - for example, one broadened their focus from a highly technical media broadcasting community, to a TV entertainment and gossip portal. The traffic increased dramatically, yet the quality of the posts dropped.
Hacker News will be fine so long as they keep things controlled and avoid the pull of the mainstream.
If this is true (and it rings truthy to me), then (a) this AMA is a service to humanity, and (b) we should start aggressively flagging these things off the site.
I say this mostly because I hate those stupid infographics; chartjunk!
The problem is this: infographics like this may be beautiful, but they are not
necessarily informative. Specifically, pretty charts often fail to synthesize the
meaning, relevance, and impact of information as it pertains to decision making.
I think they're fine in the same way that comics can be fine: Dilbert is funny because you recognize things in it, not because it's giving you important new information about business. It can be nice to see something you're already familiar with presented in an eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing way, and it might even make a nice poster for the office or something. But as ways of conveying information, the vast majority I run across aren't that good. Often a boring old two-axis scatterplot would be more informative than the flashy infographics (especially if it had usefully labeled axes and quoted its data source).
I highly recommend it. It was written decades ago and presages all of this; it tears into this USA Today chartjunky design style with a satisfying fervor.
In this case, while the crappiness of the design may be what sets me off, the license to complain about it comes from the fact that it's apparently all part of a huge SEO scam.
This is an anonymous account for obvious reasons. I also did the same job as the AMA OP, used this linkbaiting technique for over a year.
Posting as I think HN would be interested in the results.
Tens of thousands of optimised backlinks,
Quality trusted links from major news publishers (almost all of them),
Search traffic up from 30k a month to 200k,
800k to 1mill visitors a month.
The infographics game is almost up for linkbaiting. Most of the people using this technique are now moving on, including myself.
Expect some interesting innovations in this space.
I couldn't quite understand how it works. Was the idea as simple as just creating the infographic, then putting it somewhere on the site you want to juice up? (There were details about links I couldn't really follow on Reddit...)
And his response is (aggressively paraphrased): "it's probably spammy, but so what? they're my friends, they're a small shop, and the guy pointing it out is probably a competitor."
His response is horrendous. I've enjoyed a couple of his entries (although they get a little formulaic), but that response had him dropping several notches.
I don't see how this is spam, and I am surprised that people are offended that the authors of these info graphics are trying to make money.
They drew up an info graphic that you thought was entertaining. In exchange you show your friends by linking that site. This is no different than any other type of link bait, be it an inflammatory article or some sort of interactive map you would see on the New Your Times website.
Spam is different. Spam is junk blog comments with a link to another website. Those comments bring no value and diminish the value of the site. You would never link to one of those comments to show your friends like you link to these info graphics.
Digg could have solved a lot of these problems early on by introducing a couple very simple features: first, allow users to block domains, and second, allow users to block users. I can't remember how many times cracked.com or holytaco.com would show up on the frontpage and make me cringe. Reddit is starting to suffer from the same thing.
The fundamental problem with Digg and also with Reddit somewhat is that nobody wants to sit and curate the upcoming stories, and upcoming stories require far too many votes to catch steam and have a chance at hitting the front page. So it falls to a small handful of power users who have a network of friends built up who are willing to vote on their stories.
Digg essentially became an aggregator of cheap, popcorn content; the kind of stuff non-tech savvy people forward around on email.
Hacker News is still good because it's a small niche of highly tech-savvy people, but if it gets to popular it will run into the exact same issues.
I think the new Digg is actually a good step in the right direction. The truly best way to get good content is to decide yourself where it comes from. I get my best links from Twitter because I follow people who are interested in the same stuff I am. If I could define my network, the content would remain relavent. I think it would take around 500-5000 people to really generate great content, provided those people are all people you align with well.