Why doesn’t Digg have a category for the Arts?
Digg is probably the Internet’s most influential community-based popularity site, it has the ability to drive thousands of readers to a news event within minutes. It is often used as a method of inducing quick traffic streams to websites, particularly blogs. But with all this traffic and web energy digg is surprisingly insular in the areas it covers.
The two main fields are science and technology. See here for the complete list of digg fields. My question to the people in charge of digg, if ever they caught wind of this post, would be quite simply: what happened to the fields of art and culture? And don’t tell me you’ve got them covered under ‘movies’ and ‘music’ because we know that boils down to Hollywood and MTV. I’m talking about the rich and diverse artistic and cultural websites that are in abundance on the web. Surely it’s worth opening digg up to a wider audience, after all on your ‘about’ page you talk about ‘collective community’:
‘By looking at information through the lens of the collective community on Digg, you’ll always find something interesting and unique.’ (source)
So what happened? Was it something that merely passed you by or was it more of a burden to your financial plans? Maybe you figured that if you kept quiet about it nobody would notice? Well I noticed and I’m sure thousands of others did too. Isn’t it time for change?
Update: Based on responses from comments on Digg there seems to be a general view that a) art-oriented submissions would not be popular enough. b) if there were arts categories then they’d be plagued by poor quality submissions and c) perhaps other sites such as Stumble Upon and DeviantArt offer a better housing for artistic areas. I’m still not entirely convinced and I would like to hear the ‘official’ reason from the Digg founders themselves. They must have had so many demands of this sort by now, what position do they take? Please feel free to comment here or on the Digg section if you word for Digg. Thanks.
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[...] Original post by twigged.net [...]
I agree but the categories sort of overlap, films could go to videos. And arts and culture could also fir anywhere else - notice there’s no “Animal” section - and just look at the sheer number of articles on animals there are, digg could do we the addition of more categories and subcategories.
I for one would be a great supporter for an Arts & Culture category :).
I think the issue digg has is that its audience is already established and really won’t change from there. Over at 9rules Clips (just launched yesterday during our version 6 redesign) we have a large and diverse Community that takes into account many different tastes including Art & Photography. Again digg is in a difficult position because the geek crowd has already established what they like to see on the site so adding a new category probably won’t even get noticed.
Why doesn?t Digg have a category for the Arts?…
[...]My question to the people in charge of digg, if ever they caught wind of this post, would be quite simply: what happened to the fields of art and culture? And don?t tell me you cover ?movies? and ?music? because we know that boils down to Hollywoo…