Mike Arrington wrote on TechCrunch today about the problems facing Digg and how it is struggling to get beyond its initial success to a greater scale. His point is that Digg is captive to its community and that the best companies often have to defy community feedback to take a service to the next level.
All good points. Maybe, however, there is simply a limit to the scale of a community. Arrington identifies the “250,000 or so hard core Digg users” as the heart of the problem. 250K power users as the problem?! Most sites would kill to have that many power users.
The problem with Digg is that it is one site, one service, one brand, one set of community leaders (Digg employees), one community, one vibe / ethos for all things. Within a community dynamic, you can only have so many big contributors, so many “traffic cops,” so much inter-communication among the community, after which it is no longer worth while and effective for more users to contribute.
A counter point: Facebook , Yelp, or Twitter, for example, have met no limits in the size of their communities. But the difference there is that they are not one single entity. Facebook and Twitter are endlessly segmented by friendships and follows. Yelp is broken down by cities, types of entities being reviewed, etc. And it ultimately has some sort of focus on business reviews.
Digg strives to cover all things, with all posts filtering up to the Digg home page. That’s ultimately one community, and it has hit its maximum.
The future of media is every more niche and more diffuse. Digg however is trying to an NBC or CBS. There’s only so much content that can be fit on a single channel or conversely, that a single community can contribute. But the future is going to have tens of thousands of channels or content communities, each run by leaders with specific knowledge and connection to each topic.
And that’s the problem for Digg.