How weird for Digg, one day you are king of the hill next thing you know a new guy is standing by ready to dispatch you to the underworld.  Digg has been floundering for a while with a stagnation of their community but with a recent exodus of top diggers to Mixx seems like their time is near.  The thing that Digg has forgotten is that your community is king and when they ban accounts, bury articles, and allow uncontrolable spam to flourish they are hurting their community.  It could be that many Diggers are just growing up and are getting tired of comment tantrums also.  When you having intelligent conversation it makes sense to show the 8th graders to the door but in Digg not only are the 8th graders in the room but they are running the conversations many times.  (sorry 8th graders)

All of Digg’s flaws are very apparent, and that is what makes Mixx look like a shining gem of Web 2.0.  Mixx is gaining in popularity for what its not as opposed to what it is.  On the surface its another Digg clone, but deeper down is a very savvy community and social tools that are designed to encourage the little guy into Mixx.  Already I am making friends co-browsing for great content to move it up the ladder to the main page.  Instead of discouraging social communication, they encourage it.  Minutes ago I received another email this time from Tunisan Mann:

Hi, sorry to bother in your MiXXingness but I found This on MiXX.
Can anyone help me with the theory this guy is presenting here. I know it’s the "Théorie des jeux" (probably "prisoner’s dilemma"  in english) but I don’t catch his point ! thanks for anyone commenting on that.

    YouTube - How It All Ends
    http://www.mixx.com/videos/15238/youtube-how-it-all-ends

Yes I got an email, I might have even forgotten about Mixx had it not been for these emails of other users sharing content with me because they liked my content.  I was amazed to see emails from Mixx not spamming me but sending me really cool content. So Mixx is not allowing itself to be forgoten about.  Browsing their main page, no linkbait can be seen.  On Digg right on the page “Sex is Safer in Nevada Brothels than Porn Sets“.  Should I rest my case? 

On the web publisher side of things I started to take notice when I started getting traffic to older articles from Mixx.  I felt like suddenly my archives went into syndication and old articles were once again getting traction and fans.  Intrigued I followed the traffic back to Mixx and was warmly received into their community.  It was a strange feeling to actually get a warm response from a online community after seeing the social experiment play out very differently on Digg.  So is this the death of Digg? Its hard to say but I can tell you one thing, I’ve been spending my time on Mixx and hardly miss Digg.  Its like going from Windows to Mac. There’s less noise and crap and you can just get the content you need in a much cleaner atmosphere.

Check it out
my screename is ccarey76 if you wish to be my friend.

I found this one by accident, when I viewed my traffic for noheat I saw that quite a few of our clicks were coming from the Digg Expose site which of course I had never heard of.  This is a very cool site that sorts screen shots of dugg stories and shows a preview of the digg story when you roll over the screen shot.  Why is this useful?  Well with all of the digg spammers you can easily get an idea if the webpage is legit from the screen shot without wasting your time of actually going there.  Also many sites will have a picture or graphics with each story which can tell you at a glance whether the story is worth a read. Of course there is the mandatory web 2.0ish effects of the screens being laid out on the page for eye candy which may be a little unneccessary, however overall this is a pretty interesting execution of the Digg API.  We do wish that maybe the titles of each Digg were a little easier to see, and maybe not just activated on a roll over.

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So the big news today in Diggnation is the mass revolt of much of the Digg users (now a mob) in regards to a DCMA take down notice revolving around decryption information for HD-DVD content. This is big news because thousands of people took notice that Digg was being “forced” to do something that by nature of its system was undemocratic, it was a beautiful thing to watch people stand up for what was right which is to protect freedom of information and speech.This got me thinking… If hundreds of thousands of people can see when something is wrong and stand up for our rights in regards to freedoms to backup and archive DVD content why couldn’t that same power of the people be harnessed to send a clear message to congress on the War in Iraq?

I found this on Digg the other day and couldn’t help sharing, basically using Digg’s own API Alex Bosworth created a webpage that lists the top diggers for your Diggs. So now you can see who likes you the most, so its cool although a little bit narcissistic.

Check it out