Module 9: Media Switch-up - Digg
This week, I dug through the clutter of the world wide web to find Digg. What I dug about Digg was that it was a curation website that posted “the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet right now.” On the homepage, none of the content was original. Instead, all articles were essentially reposts from different websites. At the time I viewed Digg, the headlining story was GQ’s article entitled “Every Keanu Reeves Movie, Ranked.” Other notable mentions included an article about climate change, another article about divorce lawyers sharing their strangest reasons for divorce they heard, and another article on CBD. Boy, doesn’t the world seem like such a happy, positive place?
There was a section called “Digg Picks“ that featured articles that I believed were written by Digg staff. Hence, they were somewhat original. During my session, the top article included a description of a new messenger bag. Is it me or is this possibly some clever sponsored content?
According to SimilarWeb, over 66% of Digg users are in the U.S. A WikiDot report shows that Digg users are mostly male (76%) versus female (24%). The majority of users are between ages 18 to 49. In short, Digg users are mostly male, relatively young and enjoy news consumption.
While I did not see myself viewing Digg on a regular basis, it was an interesting find. I personally enjoyed viewing the cherry-picked articles. It made me feel more refined than finding articles on my Facebook news feed such as quizzes and BoredPanda stories. Furthermore, I was curious on what Digg deemed as the “most interesting content.” No respect to Keanu Reeves, but I was not sure if his movies were more interesting than a big topic like climate change.
In short, Digg is an interesting platform for content curation. As a social media manager, curation is important since not posts are 100% original. Instead, we are always taking content from other pages. In the words of Bruce Randall Hornsby (not Tupac), that's just the way it is.