Ranking the Most Popular Writers & Media Sites on the Internet

December 18, 2016 11:44 AM

Priceonomics and Digg combined to find out which websites and authors appeared most often on Digg's front page between 2013 and 2016.
posted by reenum (8 comments total)

FWIW, the original Digg died in 2010 -- the current incarnation is based on selections from an editorial staff, not user-submitted links, and front-page stories there rarely garner more than 20-30 upvotes. This analysis would be more interesting to see from Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:17 PM on December 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

True there were no editors back in its heyday, but circa 2009, 2010 some news sites (particularly tech news sites) were paying high-ranked digg users to vote their stories onto the front page. It was pay-to-play curation.
posted by not_the_water at 12:48 PM on December 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

TIL Digg is still a website
posted by entropicamericana at 1:32 PM on December 18, 2016 [5 favorites]

Is there a connection between free or fairly free access to top sites and much more limited access to less read sites?
posted by Postroad at 3:07 PM on December 18, 2016

Well, I use Digg's RSS Reader (which has turned into the best surviving RSS service for me since Google Reader had its beating heart torn from it), so nobody curates my Digg but me. Of course, there is no real 'discovery' involved unless one site I'm following links to another one that makes me think "maybe I should follow this too"... which has allowed my RSS feeds collection to grow to the mid-three-digits.
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:27 PM on December 18, 2016

TIL Digg is still a website

I'm waiting for the lists from delicio.us and memepool
posted by leotrotsky at 7:21 PM on December 18, 2016

For what it's worth, I quite like their linkblogging and the fact that this pretty old-school approach to the internet seems to be commercially viable. Those statistics are pretty cute but not too surprising for someone who actually visits their site a couple of times.
posted by dominik at 1:24 AM on December 19, 2016

Ranking the Most Popular Writers & Media Sites on the 1532nd Most Popular Site on the Internet

FTFY, Digg.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:18 AM on December 20, 2016