Two sites, Reddit and Digg, went into emergency mode today as Reddit had technical difficulties preventing users from submitting new content to the site.

reddit is in “emergency read-only mode” right now. you won’t be able to log in. we’re sorry, and are working frantically to fix the problem.

Other social news sites such as Digg experienced a drop in the quality of content as one of the primary sources for content, Reddit, went into “read-only mode” making it challenging for many top Digg users to find content. The front page of Digg has not yet experienced the fallout as most of the top images today were from yesterday’s Reddit front page, but tomorrow is expected to be a low-Digg-count-day with Redditors unable to supply Digg users with content to submit.

Many Redditors were seen outside today. Some made their monthly trip to the grocery store, barber shops, and liquor stores early, while others simply experienced external weather conditions for the first time in ages.

“I’m glad this happened,” said one top Reddit user. “It gave me a chance visit my girlfriend at her house rather than having her come over to mine. I had no idea she was such a slob!”

No word from Reddit about what caused the outage or when it will be fixed, but updates will be posted as they come available. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Reddit appears to be up and working (somewhat) properly again as submits can (somewhat) be made again. Digg power users have ceased their search for fresh content and have returned to their favorite source.

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Read more social media satire on this blog.

When Alexis speaks, Redditors listen.

From Mashable:

We’ll start things off with a real-life social media parable about how the biggest and most effective forces on the web usually take shape by accident. Alexis Ohanian of Reddit.com tells the quick and hilarious story of how the social web provided some unexpected help to Greenpeace in halting the Japanese whaling industry. Internet marketers take note: The meme is all powerful, and it cannot be controlled.

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Learn more about Social Media Marketing on this blog.

When Imgur.com first hit the scene a year ago, it quickly became the “hip” way to post, host, and share images on Reddit. Digg took notice and it soon became the most popular image site there as well.

A year later, one thing is certain – Imgur’s numbers as a result are nothing short of amazing. While these numbers are nothing compared to more well-known image sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, or Imageshack, it is still impressive considering that the traffic is almost entirely social media driven.

Click to see the full view.

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Read more about social news on this blog.

The statement could be pushed over to just about any true Web 2.0 site where voting and popularity determine the success of a piece of content. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace – overrun by spam. Mixx, Propeller, Yahoobuzz – spam havens.

For social news powerhouses Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon to be so changed by the presence of gobs and gobs of spam hits a little harder. They are the sites where I started my journey in Web 2.0. They are the shiny beacons of user-controlled, traffic-generating goodness that made mainstream media look to the people for their opinions and discoveries.

They are, for all intents and purposes, shells of what they should be, and spam is to blame. Perhaps more importantly, how they handled spam over the years has caused them to close their networks in one way or another through a series of witchhuntesque spam countermeasures.

…and spam is to blame.

Digg Paranoia

Many people go out (in this case, we’ll call her Blogger Sue), create a wonderful site or blog, put their heart and souls into the content (some even pay for strong content) and prepare their servers for the onslaught of traffic inherent with a Digg front page story.

One try, two tries, ten tries later, nothing. They’re lucky if they get 100 total visitors combined to their 10 stories.

They look at the stats. According to Di66, 2203 of the 4011 stories to hit the front page in the last 30 days came from 100 websites. Out of hundreds of thousands of submissions per month, 100 website control 55% of the Digg front page.

Blogger Sue notices something. It’s not just the domains. It’s the users. The top 100 users this month have 2197 front page submissions, again over 50% despite millions of unique visitors per month. That’s the ticket! She makes friends with a couple of top users, asks them to submit, and again waits for the traffic onslaught.

Again, she is disappointed. After several failed attempts, her site has been flagged for what some call “autobury” or “spam protection” because the Digg algorithm watches for new sites getting too many Diggs and prevents them from hitting. In any given month, new sites will account for less than 1% of the total front page stories.

Digg has trust issues. It trusts certain users and certain sites. The rest are spammers pushing spam. While on one hand you can’t blame them, as Digg is often considered the crown jewel of a traffic-driving strategy (and therefore gets spammed to death) but on the other hand there really needs to be a way to make it more fair for both new users and new sites. We have ideas, and we’ve offered them, but thus far nobody at Digg has asked our opinion.

Reddit Elitism

Reddit is the most open of the social news sites in that great content can hit the front page regardless of the submitter. Well, almost regardless. As long as the submitter is either brand new or well “vetted” by an algorithm actively pursuing spam and as long as the domain hasn’t been banned within a subreddit or by the entire site, then Blogger Sue can create an account, submit a post, title it appropriately, and have a chance of doing well.

There are 3 problems with Reddit:

1. If you get banned in a subreddit or the site itself, you may never know. You can submit and submit and submit and nobody will ever be able to see your submission. This can be done by getting banned in enough subreddits or algorithmically based upon a series of criteria that few understand.
2. The Subreddits, while they were a great idea at first, have partitioned into “traffic or no traffic”. There are a handful of subreddits that gained popularity early on and have continued to gain in popularity simply because they’re popular. The others are worthless and there it’s almost impossible to get traction into a small subreddit.
3. The moderators. Too much power for the “trusted” few who have control over the strong subreddits. They can (and in many cases, have) banned users or domains based upon simply not liking someone or something. There are subreddits where respectable, completely non-spammy domains are blocked because they weren’t liked by an individual.

There are solutions at Reddit as well, but again, nobody seems to be looking for them. The offer, as always, is on the table.

StumbleUpon Contradictions

There are a dozen people in the universe who have figured out how to properly promote via StumbleUpon. For the rest, it’s hit or miss. Do we Stumble a lot or not? Subscribe a lot or not? Discover a lot or not? Should we share? Not share? Tweet? Su.pr?

Why did Blogger Sue stumble one decent story that got 30,000 unique visitors in a week, then stumble a great piece of content from the same domain that got 30 views?

StumbleUpon has been successful in driving traffic to quality sites, but has also been victim of filters that keep a TON of content out of the mix.  There are stories that are served up thousands of times before the algorithm realizes the content sucked, while other pieces of content that are gloriously powerful aren’t served to a single person regardless of who discovers it.

With StumbleUpon, I have no advice because I don’t understand it enough to offer any. Sorry guys.

What is the Future of Social News?

Digg.

Reddit.

StumbleUpon.

They are the present and will likely be the future as well. Still, there are things on the horizon that have potential. Tying in conversation within other networks is an option. Judging quality through batches of moderators vetting content is another. Someone will come up with a solution, then thousands will figure out ways to game and spam it.

That’s the nature of the beast, which is why I still love these sites, regardless of whether they’re dead or not.

… and spam is to blame.

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Read more about social news on this blog.

Lee Garnett from ncomment did it again. We knew that the first comic was absolutely amazing, but this Part 2 took it to another level.

Click the image for the full comic (but check out part I first if you haven’t already).

How awesome is that!

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Read more about social news on this blog.

Imgur.com understands social media better than any other image-storage service on the Internet.

“How the hell did flickr get through our defenses?”

They started by posting high-quality, original humorous images. They then got the attention of Reddit but being the “go to pic place”. Digg and other social news sites are starting to get it.

How did they get so strong so quickly? They kept it simple.

1. Shortened URL instantly
2. Two clicks to post
3. Link straight to the image without ads
4. ???????
5. Profit

They are everything that tinypic isn’t. You don’t need an account. You don’t need an email. You find an image, post it, and score.  It owns the Pics subreddit, a huge one with over 130K subscribers.  It’s the most common image source on Digg now with more front pages every day. In short, Imgur understands how to appeal to social media users.  If alexa is to be trusted, it’s worked.  Their reach has increased by 392% in 3 months and they are closing in on being a top 2000 site in the world.

While they aren’t nearly as big as imageshack, tinypic, or flickr, it should only be a matter of time for them to build up the site-bulk required to compete with other image services.  Either way, we give them mega-kudos to really understanding Web 2.0.

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Read more about social news on this blog.

(This story has been updated with a newer idea here: A Plan for Social Media Sites (and users) to Give Back)

Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Slashdot, Newsvine, NowPublic, Yahoo! Buzz.  Between these seven sites, traffic to a particular website can easily exceed 100,000, potentially much higher.

With so much power to drive people to various websites across the Internet, why are none of them greatly involved with charity?  I’m not talking about donating – I’m sure that the companies or their executives donate.  I’m talking about making a difference.  I’m talking about using their power to drive traffic and applying it to charity websites.

The reason that they don’t is that they (other than Slashdot) are strictly driven by the actions, likes, and intentions of the users.  You could argue that there is a human hand or two manipulating the system from time to time, but that’s an entirely different post.

Would it be wrong or unjustified to use the server-busting power of their front pages for an occasional bit of  philanthropy?  It wouldn’t be hard to do at all.  There would be those who would cry out “don’t preach to me” or “keep your humanity to yourself” but for the most part, I believe the communities would embrace it.  Who knows – they might just learn something from time to time that has more substance than lolcats and bacon.

Digg could very easily create a category for charity.  They could hire a handful of people to moderate the category more closely than others to keep the spam to a minimum.  The threshold could be lowered a bit (if necessary, though it probably wouldn’t be) to get a story or two a day on the front page.

As with all categories, if a user doesn’t want “charity shoved down their throat” they can always turn the category off completely.

Reddit could adopt a different type of charitable technique.  By making a charity subreddit that was featured as one of the  primary selections on the front page and making it a default, the subreddit would grow quickly.  No need for moderators – the community self-moderates well.

Even better, they can integrate their technology into a new site dedicated to charity, activism, and philanthropy.

Slashdot is clearly more tech-niche-oriented, but their control of the front page is a perfect way to make sure that tech-related stories involving charities (there are plenty) received attention from time to time.

Newsvine and NowPublic have strong communities that really pays more attention to original stories written on the websites by the users than most of the links posted there.  It would take the users themselves, especially the “powerful” ones, to take more of a stand and write about charities (then link to them, of course).  Still, the sites can help promote it through special sections dedicated strictly to charity and posted on the front page.

Yahoo! Buzz – still a tough one to understand from a traffic perspective, but potentially the most powerful of them all.  As with Slashdot, the super-popular stories are hand-picked, so squeezing in a story or two every now and then for the sake of righteousness would be a piece of cake.

StumbleUpon already has a way to implement charity into their system.  They have an advertising platform that allows people to buy Stumbles for a nickel.  Why not open that up and allow some charities to join in?  They could easily send a conservative 500-1000 people a day to a page with a 5 cent discount given to charities.  My math is spotty at best, but I believe that comes to a total cost of none, both for the charity and for StumbleUpon.  If it does well, the charities can always purchase more than their low daily quota.

Regardless of what they do, it is important and practical that they do something.  Times are tough for many.  Charitable giving is naturally down as a result.  With the power that they wield, it just makes sense that they should use just a small bit of that power to help make the world better.

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For more social media opinions, visit Social News Watch often.

This is a repost of an article that still applies today despite being about 19 years old.

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been studying the major social news websites. Reddit, being one of the best ones, was obviously tops on my list. I did everything that seemed to work well on Digg, Propeller, Newsvine, and most other social media sites.

The results were different from the others. I was successful in the others. Needless to say, I wasn’t successful at Reddit.

My first technique was simple. Make friends, spam a lot, wait for the “Karma” to rise. It didn’t. Actually took a week to break 20. I wasn’t happy, but I kept trying.

I’ve discovered some tricks and tips, rising to a marginally respectable Karma around 1700 over several months. Most of those points have come in the last two. Still, I really couldn’t find rhyme or reason to what was working and what wasn’t. Stories that I thought would surely hit the homepage got down-modded to oblivion, while others that were decent stories at best got dozens, even hundreds of votes.

So, I asked.

I started messaging a bunch of the top dogs on reddit. Sadly, I received few replies. Perhaps it was my message:

Hello (name),I just wanted to say hello. I’ve been marginally active in Reddit for a little while. Lately, I’ve started to become more active and I wanted to message my “friends” and really try to be a friend on Reddit. For a while, I’ve not quite understood how Reddit worked. Now, I’m trying to learn. Any advice you can give me would be great. Should I send messages? Make more friends? I really want to be active on here.Thanks! DiffeeOnline Over 80 messages sent. Seven replied. The advice was great from those who bothered. One in particular stood out, and to my pleasant surprise, it was a response from qgyh2, the Reddit member who gets more Karma in a day than I’ve been able to accumulate over several months. Here is the response:
Hi! thank you for your kind words!! well… I would suggest some of the following:

• post a wide variety of stories
• if a good story is buried, delete and resubmit – by this I mean sometimes if you post a story that a lot of people like, and some people downmod also, its worth deleting it and resubmitting it in an hour or so.
• keep trying – reddit is sometimes rather saddening as people keep downmodding stories. Just ignore this and keep submitting the stories you like. Pretend that there is nobody else but you and just keep submitting what you like and believe in.
• after submitting a story, watch it and delete it if it is heavily downmodded – sometimes people will start to downmod a story for some random reason – e.g. they don’t like it – when this happens it can affect your karma score so its best to delete the story – but first be sure that people are not upmodding the story also! because if people are upmodding also then it could be a good story!! yes do send messages to people. some people on reddit are quite good and they are friendly. besides i guess its always worth a try. some people may not respond but some people do.. and a few would become friends so why not well, wish you best of luck on reddit! keep trying you can get there!!

The part about deleting concerned me. Was it ethical to take a story that had been down-modded and resubmit it? Wouldn’t the results be the same?

I tried it, and within a few posts, I understood. Some excellent stories get dumped because the way the system works now, it only takes a handful of abusive users to down-mod a story and make it virtually invisible. A couple of great stories would have never made it to the light if it wasn’t for this advice.

THANK YOU, qgyh2. Your concern and willingness to take interest in a junior-reddit-jedi-padawan-wannabe and offer a thoughtful response reinvigorated my belief that Reddit can be very useful and enjoyable in the social news segment of the Internet.

Here are some other great points from the advice I received from other members:

• I would advise probably doing the same as you’ve done to me – sending friendly emails and working a relationship. Reddit is a little different where friends are not held as accountable as sites like Digg where you can actually see if a friend has voted or not.
• Otherwise, the only other advice I can offer is don’t be discouraged if your submissions are not instant hits – keep trying.
• The best way to be active in the reddit community, AFAIK, is submit good stories, thoughtful comments, vote often.
• You can view your friends post here. Here is a good place to learn the commenting syntax. People on the programming subreddit can be a bitch. Beware of getting into fights with trolls. Sometimes a quick and witty smartass reply can be better than a long thought out one. Looks like you have enough karma to get past the posting block, so you are good there.
• My main advice is to have fun. It’s a place to read about what’s new online, and to see peoples takes on it. This will show you the base rules to making nice. You don’t always have to follow, but do what’s fun for you.

I hope it helps!

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Read more about How to Reddit on this blog.

When the news wires started buzzing, burning, and smoking about Dennis Kucinich introducing 35 letters of impeachment against President George W. Bush, we started watching the three top social media sites to see who would get the news the quickest to their front page.

As of the time of this post, it was broken 3 hours, 33 minutes ago.  We started watching the front pages of Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Newsvine, and Mixx just over 3 hours ago.  Here are the results:

Propeller and Newsvine: Currently not on the front page.  This is disappointing, as one of the reasons to have Scouts and Anchors on Propeller is to quickly move breaking stories to the front page.  For Newsvine, which has a front page that is similarly edited and also feeds directly from many news sources, this is not a good omission.

Digg: 2 hours, 38 minutes.  The first three stories that broke the news were bypassed by this Rawstory piece.  The odd part came when the live C-Span coverage received quite a few more diggs (over 300 in 2 and a half hours) but was immediately “buried” from the upcoming section when the other story hit the front page.  Fishy.

Mixx and Reddit: Less than 30 minutes.  By the time we started checking the front pages, both Mixx and Reddit had it already on the front page.  Mixx had it in their innovated Breaking section and Reddit members had already pushed it to the front page naturally.

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Read more about Social News Sites right here.

On an episode of The Drill Down 3 weeks ago, MrBabyMan, Zaibatsu, MSaleem, and about 50 people in the chat room of their Ustream broadcast discussed putting up a site where stories that didn’t make it to the front page of Digg could “find a resting place.”  After a quick brainstorming session, Lost Shovels was born.

While it hasn’t taken off yet as hoped with only 4 stories posted there currently, a variation of the idea was created at PopFAIL.  This one has much more activity currently (I am one of the contributors) and each submission is accompanied by an analysis of why it didn’t make it and why it should have made it to the front page of Digg.

Both LostShovels and PopFAIL exemplify what should be happening with social media.  While voting is currently king of what does and does not hit the front page of Digg and other social media sites, it brings to light a variation of a solution.  Keeping a site “purely” user driven is nice in concept, but as sites gain power and increase in users, the inevitable flood of poor content starts to creep onto the front page.  Trends take over.  Currently, politics is so heavily weighted on Digg that the former Tech News powerhouse often looks more like a dumping ground of political commentary.

New social media sites are popping up every day.  Some have promise.  Mixx is one in particular that demonstrates a stronger desire to and more malleable platform through which to make a “smarter” promotion system.  Propeller has been promising major changes for a while.  Reddit is Reddit, but even its homepage is starting to seem more quality-based of late.

Until somebody figures out a way to put the best of the best at the top and the rest at the bottom, PopFAIL and Lost Shovels are potentially viable options to see what “coulda, shoulda, woulda” been a popular submission on Digg.

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