The truth shall make you free...

The truth about social news is coming out, and it is exactly as I expected: the top 10 DIGG users are responsible for 30% of the home page stories.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

From DIGGtrends (via ZD):

"As per Kevin, there are 444,809 registered users, out of these only 2287 contributed one or more story for the period of 6/19/2006 9:31:28 PM to 7/30/2006 4:41:34 PM, may be most of the users just digg & not submit any story, remember the 1% rule?"

Think about that... only 2,000 out of 400k users submitted a story. That's .5% of users actually submit a story--I guess the 1% rule is really the .5% rule! :-)

The folks at DiggTrends also want to know who we hired as Navigators... we'll announce that later today. I think we have three of the top 20 DIGG users (and two from the top 10!). We also hired from Newsvine, delicious, and Reddit top users. I really hope this model works and we can grow from 12 paid Navigators to 100! It's really up to the 12 folks we hire to make things happen... if they can build Netscape I can easily make the case to hire more Navigators. So, go get 'em team Netscape!!!

Aug 2nd 2006 11:31AM
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1. One of the reasons I hate submitting stories to digg is the abuse you get from commentors. If the store is old, but not submitted to digg in the past, you get the diggjerks telling you how lame you are and that your story is old. Or, you get the people who tell you it isn't proper tech news, or one of the several several reasons like that.

Who wants to post something only get get back handed when you do post something. After submitting about 50 times, I just stopped because it wasn't worth the trouble of trying to be a good user. I even stopped digging stories and turned to lurker mode like I did on /. years ago.

Posted at 1:05PM on Aug 2nd 2006 by TheODogg

2. ...like I did on /. years ago.

Hmmm... sensing a trend, here. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the lack of social grace for which nerds are famous.

When your only reward is warm fuzzies from the community, you don't have much left when you take away the warm fuzzies. Personally, I'd rather have $1000/mo.

Posted at 3:03PM on Aug 2nd 2006 by Michael Martine

3. bottom line Jason, did you get them on a contract? if you did, it will be intesting to see the conditions...

Posted at 3:27PM on Aug 2nd 2006 by zx

4. I always said this was a brilliant idea. Glad I suggested it to you. :-)

Posted at 4:28PM on Aug 2nd 2006 by michael arrington

5. The bottom line is you're trying to hire members of another site to post for you, on yours.

On digg they post for free, because they choose to. You're trying to attract them away with money. Thats like starting the Yellow Cross and trying to lure all the Red Cross volunteers away with a couple of bucks. I guess you could do it, but its just wrong, dude.

All it proves is that you can't attract the users because they naturally enjoy utilizing your site, you have to pay them.

Money does not buy you popular.

Posted at 8:07PM on Aug 2nd 2006 by andrew

6. So what's to stop the next guy coming along and offering $2000? in other words, how much is it worth to seed a news site? What happens when venture money is added into the pot? Will the seeders be the new Web 2.0 millionaires?

Posted at 6:51AM on Aug 3rd 2006 by Mark Devlin

7. Shouldn't you calculate the 1% rule off of active users over the same period (not off of total registrations)? I'm betting that would push their contributor % over 1.

Posted at 7:47AM on Aug 3rd 2006 by smorty71

8. I've always been a big fan of Jason's for the very simple reasons he takes action and gets things moving.

He has tons of new folks (many of them Tech early adopters) checking out Netscape. He's very, very quickly repositioned Netscape. He has a lot of people talking about him and Netscape.

All for a few thousand dollars and a couple of blog posts!

Sure, from his picture he looks like a bulldog. But he seems to be a smart bulldog.

Posted at 11:37AM on Aug 3rd 2006 by Brendon Sinclair

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