If you’ve ever crafted an excellent piece of news / opinion / ranting, there are times when you think — hey, this might be a piece that more people should know about. Perhaps, as some search professionals call it, it might even be thought of as, how the French say, “le linkbait?” But, as you post it, and start telling some friends about it you start to realize: “Wait! I need to maximize how a post ought to be posted to social news/ bookmarking sites!” Such as Digg.
And before you know it, one of your well-meaning friends, or perhaps, a well-meaning stranger, has submitted your site to Digg, Reddit, or Netscape before you can do anything about it.
Such is the “Early Bird Dilemma”.
What is this phenomena?
Well, I’ve given this name to the circumstances where a post of yours is submitted to a social news or bookmarking site BEFORE you get a chance to choose
a) who submits it
b) when it gets submitted
Who cares who submits it? Well, if your goal is to get your post frontpaged, you’ll care. Because people who have acconts that a) been around for a while have submissions that are “worth more” [more likely to float to the frontpage] and b) accounts that have tons of friends are more likely to accumulate diggs faster.
Who cares when it gets submitted? Submissions that are posted during the weekdays, and generally during business hours, are more likely to accumulate more diggs [although the competition is clearly more] than posts that are submitted during off peak times.
What’s the problem? Well, the problem is that when a post (or more specifically, a specific URL) gets submitted, it cannot be submitted again. You really only get one shot, and if that shot is taken by someone not of your choosing and not of the time you specified … well, tough luck.
Hence, the “Early Bird Dilemma” — in other words, some other submitter is the Early Bird, and you miss out on getting the “worm”, or, controlling when your post gets submitted and by whom. NB: Clearly the Early Bird Dilemma is one of those “good” dilemmas if your blog gets enough traffic, has enough subscribers, or is known on social news sites as one of “those” blogs to watch, because the chance of you running into the Early Bird Dilemma is higher in those circumstsances.
So, what to do?
There are two strategies:
1) Be the Early Bird: If you’ve got something that is clearly going to be awesome, you need to try and control as many variables as you can. And until you DO control them, don’t publish it. Or, if you’re serious, don’t even tell your friends about it. Because the instant you hit “publish” (for Wordpress anyway — hey, did you upgrade to WP 2.1.2 yet?), it gets published to the world — and becomes instantly available via feed reader. If the when and who are important to you, then line up a friend with lots of friends on his or her Digg account, and kindly ask if they wouldn’t mind submitting it — before you post. Then, time the posting’s submission so that it comes out on a weekday, and preferably early in the AM, as it will get maximum exposure during the course of the day. You can forward timestamp your posts quite easily in Wordpress using the “Post Timestamp” bit on the right side.
2) Be the Black Bird: As in, dabble in “Black SMO” tactics. There are a few reasons why people STILL submit duplicate posts; sometimes its in an effort to try and “out-headline” fellow diggers in a bid to get a frontpage story (better headlines, all things being equal, will get more diggs). But, if some well meaning Digger (or other user of another social news / bookmarking site) gets to your post first, it might be a tactic that floats on your radar screen. There are a few choices, and one of them involves submitting it again, but adding non-sensical marks to the end of the URL, like a “#”. Digg’s algorithm has a tough time recognizing this AT FIRST, and will allow the submission to go through. Also, if you own the URL that your blog is on, you could create a redirect script (through PHP), or through the header to bounce to the post of your own design. That way, you’d be submitting a different URL than the one of your actual post.
** caution: I am not in any way advocating these “Black SMO” methods; I only present them to you as a reason why duplicate submissions get done, and for the sake of completeness. The consequences, if you tread down this path, could be dire, namely banned accounts, banned URLs, and a stain on your reputation.
At the end of the day, the early bird dilemma is really only a dilemma if you have a site of some consequence, but are prone to ignorance, procrastination, or sheer laziness — but still care about getting Dugg. There’s controversy around the value of getting on the frontpage of Digg, but if its something you “digg” (ha ha, yes, I love bad puns), then it pays to be perspicacious, but above board, of course, in your SMO tactics.
March 5th, 2007 at 3:36 am | Permalink
Tony: you might not even know how important this dilemma currently is. Before, if your articles get submitted with bad titles and descriptions, or too often, they would just be forgotten. Now, you risk getting on digg’s kill-list, as I like to call it.
I cannot prove this, but based on very extensive testing (read my post on 901am), it’s a new concept introduced by Digg which enables silent banning of websites they don’t like. Basically, your domain doesn’t get banned, but everything submitted from it will get buried within minutes.
It’s hard to determine what exactly can cause a domain to get to this status (except the obvious: previous banning), but it’s possible that every little bit counts: bad titles, regular buries, controversial topics, too many submissions from the same domain, intentional duplicates (as you call it, black bird).
So, webmasters have absolutely no control on who submits their stories to Digg, and yet it can probably result in a silent ban.
(I’m going to shorten the rant now, don’t want to have a 5-page comment (;. If you want more information on this topic, please contact me via e-mail)
The bottom line is that the new system is horrible, and there’s no good way to protect your site from it because you depend on submissions from others.
March 5th, 2007 at 1:41 pm | Permalink
Oh, Stan — believe me, even though the domains were just reinstated I’ve encountered the easy-buried phenomena for months. I know that Dan Cohn and Steve O’Hear wonder, in some part, about an automatic black flag or “silent” bury that you’re talking about, but I’m in the opposite camp.
I don’t think it exists; rather, its a combination of a sophisticated burying algorithm (I’mi sure that the ease of burying something varies with how recent something is and other factors, such as how many existing votes it has, plus the domain’s history of buries etc) + the absolute hatred that people have for the URLs you mention and/or the topics they represent.
You wondered whether or not its possible for people to monitor certain kind of URLs people submit? Well, it is possible as you can follow the RSS feeds of any search term — and you just have to search for the domain of choice to follow it.
You make tons of good points and hypotheses; however, I think at the end of the day we underestimate the shear loathing a subset of the Digg population has for blogs — in general. I’ll try and dig up some examples, but every now and again, it appears in teh comments portion of a dugg blog post. And since Digg is so large, it only needs a tiny sliver of a sliver of people to feel the same way, and bury it.
Cheers
t
March 5th, 2007 at 2:04 pm | Permalink
Tony: you’re probably right about the sophisticated burying algorithm; after all, I’ve been writing about something similar over at 901am.
But I find it very hard to believe that this is the work of a group who hates these blogs, and monitors Digg’s activity for submissions from certain domains. Some of the stories from the previously banned websites have been buried at 1 vote, literally within minutes. Some of these stories were very neutral in nature. I’ve been an avid digger for a long time, and I have never noticed outbursts of hate towards certain domains unless the stories were really controversial/pornographic/spammy.
Like you say, Digg’s population is vast, but only a tiny fraction of that population monitors upcoming stories as they appear. And I can give you a list of a hundred domains (including deepjiveinterests) that have absolutely all their stories buried in the last 7 days. I think that there might be a bury here and there, but it must be helped by a big push from Digg.
Whether this push is in the form of a black flag, or an algorithm which severely punishes certain aspects of a domain (previous buries, previous banning, etc), I cannot say, but it’s unfair as it doesn’t seem to apply to A-list sites which get tons of buries too, as can easily be seen on Digg spy.
March 5th, 2007 at 4:35 pm | Permalink
Since it’s your website, you could always just go in and change the post slug on an article that has a crap submission to get past filters.
I wrote a post last week where I looked at all the different ways one of my URLs was saved to del.icio.us because of various reasons:
http://engtech.wordpress.com/2007/02/28/how-to-save-urls/
March 5th, 2007 at 11:34 pm | Permalink
[...] Tony over at DeepJiveInterests (another one of my favorite blogs) made a post on the beating the “early bird” Diggers. I know first hand how bad it can be for a story if someone submits it with a poor headline, bad intro text, or in completely the wrong category. [...]