4 Responses to “* Low Engagement, Flattening Traffic, Gets Rewarded At Digg-Clone, Mixx”

1. 4 months vs. 3 years?? :
   February 25th, 2008 at 10:02 am | Permalink

   A few things to note about your post.
   1. You call mixx a clone, yet you also say they have distinguishing features. Which is it? Contradicting oneself doesn’t make for a good blog post.
   2. When a product comes out that improves over the original, does that make it a clone? Does Duracell make Rayovac clones? Is Google a clone of Yahoo? If companies weren’t allowed to try to innovate over other products, what a horrible place the world would be.
   3. Mixx has been out a grand total of 4 months. Digg has been out 3 years?? Given the amount of differentiating features Mixx has produced in 4 months while Digg has done nothing but piss off its users and still not address the biggest problem… why do you continue to defend a dinosaur? Digg has basically become the Microsoft of the social news space–a monopoly that cares not for its users, cares not for producing good quality code, and is a success primarily because it was there first (not because of a superiority of the product). Techcrunch did a review that said Digg is still best. Their entire reasoning? Because its bigger. In that case,then GM makes the best cars, Microsoft the best software. Doesn’t sound reasonable to me.
   4. Look more completely at compete and you see graphs like this:
   http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com+reddit.com+mixx.com/?metric=uv
   that shows that mixx.com has a higher engagement level than Digg or Reddit. Not a bad place to be after 4 months.

2. Tony Hung :
   February 25th, 2008 at 10:34 am | Permalink

   Hi there anonymous!

   1. It is possible for something to be a Digg clone and yet also have some distinguishing features; the are not mutually exclusive arguments. A few different features doesn’t obliviate the fact that it is what it is. Don’t take it personally, I regard almost every site that has come after Digg a Digg-clone.

   2. So yes, it does still make it a clone. Let’s not have this tired argument. Its ok to innovate, but Digg practically invented social news, and is now the biggest one of them all. Everyone associates Digg with the category as it practically *is* the category of social news for geeks.

   3. You’re right — Digg is the microsoft of the social news arena. Irrespective of its quality, and there’s little anyone else can really do about it

   3. Engagement can be measured all kinds of ways. When I see that no one is commenting or that few people are voting, that means more than any one analytics site is going to tell me.

   Finally –

   Irrespective of how good you think Mixx is, or that its young, and that we should give it a chance — my argument is that in this category, I don’t see how it justifies another million dollar round of funding.

   You’re right — just because Digg is the biggest doesn’t make it the best. On the other hand, I don’t foresee it being rocked from its perched in the near future.

   Or Mixx challenging the MANY other competitors in this arena.

   You might make the “if we can just grab a small part of the pie” argument, and if that’s what Mixx wants to be, that’s fine.

   The question then remains is if Mixx’s VC backers are going to make their 10x investments (at least 3-5 million –> 30-50M)

   But by the zealousness of your argument (and the fact that you’ve popped up more than once defending Mixx) my suspicion is that you think that Mixx can do much more than that.

   But I haven’t seen anything that suggests otherwise.

   Thanks for stopping by though.
   Tony

3. 4 months vs. 3 years?? :
   February 25th, 2008 at 11:45 am | Permalink

   And again, I’ll draw the point that investors will put money in places where they think they will generate a return. Someone invested in microsoft because they saw the opportunity to improve upon what came before. Someone invested in Google because they thought they could unseat the unbeatable Yahoo. THey invested in Facebook, despite MySPace’s overwhelming “kingdom.”

   The other thing to note is that the percentage of internet users even knowing what the heck a social news site is–its absurdly small. Digg’s usage has been fairly flat for the last 6 months. If they have captured all the audience they are going to, there is 80% (or more) of audience out there that doesn’t currently use social news sites still up for grabs.

   I think Mixx provides a great alternative to Digg, Reddit, Propeller, etc. I think its just ridiculous that so many vacuous writers push off Reddit, Propeller, etc as a “Digg clone” without doing the same to other sites that started off as a second-mover. Its inconsistent and hypocritical. That’s not a “tired old argument” — its the truth, and dismissing something as a tired old argument actually allows you to avoid addressing the whole poing. Next time you write about Pownce, how about calling it a Twitter-clone? You wrote about the Netscape browser? Why not refer to that as a clone of what came before? I mean, why perpetuate the whole “everything is a digg clone” myth without being consistent across the web? Its just bad writing and shows a bias that you should wear openly (I’m a digg and kevin rose fanboy) instead of trying to say that you do real news and analysis and review.

4. 4 months vs. 3 years?? :
   February 25th, 2008 at 11:48 am | Permalink

   oh, and to quote you:

   “Digg practically invented social news”

   if they only practically invented it, then you admit yourself that someone else invented it, so Digg too, is a clone.

   ;-)