Jason Kottke got front page Digged and Slashdotted and compared the two surges in traffic, complete with graphs, to come to the following conclusions:

The Alexa data suggests that Digg has half the traffic of Slashdot, but that results in 4x the number of visitors from Slashdot and a much larger influence afterwards. The data aside, the Digg link was fun and all but ultimately insignificant. The Slashdot link brought significantly more readers to the site, spurred many other sites to link to it, and appears to have left me with a sizable chunk of new readers.

Hmm has been slashdotted a couple times and it usually brings 10,000+ hits the first day and then the ripple effect that Kottke describes in his very detailed entry. We haven’t had a front page Digg yet although I’ve submitted a couple posts that I thought were of higher quality. Think the most diggs received was a little over 30. Certainly Hmm is not being dugg by the digg crowd. Oh well, maybe I’ll strike gold one of these days. I’m curious if it will be something new or something old from the archives.

I’ve noticed Slashdot seems to have fresher material than Digg. Not a lot fresher, but more on the whole, and we can throw out the gaming stuff on Slashdot since there are editors.

Kottke’s also says of Digg: “brighter initial burn but less influence over time [than Slashdot].”

One of Digg’s greatest strengths in editorial — and weaknesses just like Wikipedia — is in the power of the people. The theory is that by having a bunch of people editing and sharing links it’s going to make the cream rise to the top, but what’s being heavily discounted among some digg fans is the number of people who are attempting to game the system by creating additional accounts and digging their own stuff in a circle jerk like frenzy to get it to the front page.

I have one account for Digg and no interest in creating more just to get a burst of 10-25k in traffic. If something written here is front page digg-worthy I’d welcome the traffic, of course.

Personally, I like both sites for different reasons. Slashdot for just about everything Kottke said about them and Digg because it always seems to have something I haven’t seen, even if it’s a bit older sometimes. Both sites do have some crossover as he indicated so depending on which you read more will determine where you saw some stories first.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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