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OMG! Am I high or is there really CAPTCHAs all over Digg. Okay I have confirmed it, a people saw the CAPTCHAs too. Okay what’s going on?

What is Digg trying to do? Stop spammers? Well the only spammers I saw on Digg was those McCain or Obama supporting village idiots. Some guy commented on one of my submissions:

IF RON PAUL WOULD BE PRESIDENT, WE WOULDN’T NEED “HOW TO USE DIGG” GUIDES
RON PAUL 2012

Oh wait. Who’s Ron Paul again? I didn’t see him on the news or anything. Wait. WTF? I went to the profile of the retard who posted this and look what I found. He’s been spamming Digg about this Ron Paul guy. Seriously who the fuck is Ron Paul? Oh he was running for President.

You know what? I thank Digg. This was a smart move actually. Now idiots like him can’t post comments. They’ll be trying to figure out what they should enter. I bet most of those retards never even seen a CAPTCHA.

Man who’s idea was this? Kevin Rose? Ah who cares, but it was a brilliant one. Good bye <enter candidate’s name> “brigade” (that’s what they call those retards).

But, then I think about it and it makes me wonder if the activity on Digg is going to go down. Like people are pretty lazy and it takes a lot of effort to put in the CAPTCHA everytime you post a comment. I guess the people at Digg never thought of that. Or maybe the fat, lazy people will just quit using Digg. Not bad.

So, what do you think of this? Are you going to post comments and send mass shouts on Digg anymore or is it a lot of work for you? Are you thanking Digg for this or hating on them?

Update (3 hours later): Digg just realized that the activity was going to go down and the diggers were really pissed off. Now the good news is that they took off all the new CAPTCHAs. Thanks to my post (duh!).

Update (5 hours later): Sorry guys bad news. Digg is not taking the CAPTCHAs off. They are just testing it right now and that’s why it was a bit buggy. At the moment you can’t see them, but Digg will put them back eventually.

Hmm so I thought why not post a little guide about what people should submit to Digg. This should give you an idea of what kind of topics work best on Digg. And you might wanna check out my beginner’s guide to Digg.

Well you need to keep in mind that not everyone on Digg is going to like your submission. That’s how you get buried. Duh! Okay lets move on. No more noobish stuff.

1. Something hilarious

Everyone likes to laugh. If you can make them laugh, you’ve got their digg. Most of us have a short attention span (or we’re just busy). So, a funny picture would be perfect. Takes a few seconds to look at and figure out what’s going on (unless you’re a blonde, of course).

And what about videos? I’m not too sure about that. You would need to have something unique then. Like the website is down, for example. Here’s another great tip. Try making fun of someone (or a group). Everyone loves a racist joke (but most people have a hard time admitting it). Just don’t go all Nazi.

2. Breaking news (or just news)

Digg is the best social bookmarking site for news. Got something great to share? Do it ASAP. A submission with a headline like “McCain becomes President. WTF?! How?” would be perfect.

Now only submit news that will help people. Or at least the ones we’re interested in and try to stick to subjects like the web, tech, gaming and Digg itself. Oh and try to submit “bad” news because it travels faster and further.

3. Controversial

Make people argue. You need to make them shout. Make them go angry. Make them say “you’re wrong! I’m right! Digg is better than Reddit!”. Getting any ideas? Things like “McDonalds vs Burger King” will work well. Like comparing things and being neutral (no buries that way).

But, keep in mind that this doesn’t always work. So good luck! And let me know how this went.

4. Guides, tips, helpful things, etc

The subheading says it all. Help them and they’ll help you. Teach them something interesting. For example a guide on how to install Linux. Well maybe that won’t be extremely helpful, but you get the idea. A guide on how to make Vista use less RAM would be great. Just keep it unique and new.

Update: Another reason you shouldn’t blog when you’re really, really tired. Actually you can only submit those 4 topics to digg. But, everything wasn’t a complete BS. #1 & #2 works great. Try those two.

Yep that’s it. I hope this was helpful to you. A mixture of the right topic, loyal digg buddies and luck will take you to the front page. And let me know which one works the best for you.

Guess what? I was doing some research and I found some pretty interesting stuff. Your chance to get on Digg’s front page. I’m going to pin-point the the best days of the week to make a submission on Digg.

The Lucky 3 Days

Lets call it the “lucky 3 days”. It’s Friday, Saturday and Sunday. These are the days where you could get on Digg’s front page a bit easily and stay there longer than usual.

• Friday - People are tired. They want some rest. Some have plans for the night. And therefore, there’s a bit less activity on Digg. There are still a bunch of users, but not as much as on weekdays.
• Saturday - Digg is completely dead. I’m not joking. Submissions with only 150 diggs get on the front page and they stay there for a few extra hours since there’s not a lot of users digging and submitting stuff.
• Sunday - Not as dead as Saturdays, but still. You’re not gonna stay on the front page as long as you would on Saturday though.

There is a catch!

Sorry I didn’t mean to ruin it for you, but you need to know something else too. I did mention that Digg goes pretty much dead on the lucky 3 days, right? That means most users will be offline. So, who’s going to digg your stuff then? Yeah that’s the horrible little catch.

Okay here’s the deal. You need to have a bunch of loyal friends on Digg. Plan to stay on the computer and digg each other’s stuff. You need to get around 150-200 diggs on average. These are just estimates, of course. But, you get the idea.

Do you think you can manage to do that? If you can then maybe you’ll get to the holy front page. And if you’re wondering about the traffic then don’t worry about it. You’ll get pretty much the same amount of traffic. Maybe not the same digg effect that fries your server, but still, it’s pretty good.

Go ahead and give it a shot this week. Let us know if it worked for you or not. And good luck!

Why am I saying that StumbleUpon’s (SU) traffic is better than Digg’s? Am I joking? Of course not. Let me explain this to you today.

Okay before you start thinking that I’m high or something. Let me tell you that I’m not trying to convince you to use SU more often than Digg. Digg is great. Use them both. But, these 2 bookmarking sites are really different. I’m taking about the traffic patterns.

Over at Digg, once you hit the (holy) front page you’ll get the biggest traffic wave ever. And when you’re on the first page on upcoming with the most diggs, you get a pretty good amount of visitors too. Overall you get a decent traffic from Digg on average. But, this traffic wave only lasts a few hours. You get off the front page, remember?

What about SU? Well at SU, the traffic wave is a bit smaller than Digg’s, but you get that with a lot less effort and time. My post about Twitter vs Plurk got 17 reviews and I got about 300 visitors from SU. And the visitors from SU came at the same time (causing my VPS to crash). That day I got about 500 visitors from SU, in total.

The best thing is the traffic from SU is long-term. I’m still getting a bunch of people from SU to my Twitter vs Plurk post. SU traffic lasts a few months. Yes that’s right, a few months. The traffic might get smaller as the weeks pass, but still, I would rather have a (semi) big traffic wave at first and then smaller ones later.

So, should you concentrate more on SU? Well it’s up to you. I would say you try to get on Digg’s front page and also get a buch of stumbles and reviews. More traffic that way, huh? First a server crash then a bunch of little traffic over the weeks.

Okay what about you? Are going to stick to SU or Digg? Or use both? Which one would you concentrate more on?

Hmm looks like Digg just got the “Digg effect”. You can never have enough bandwidth. Yeah that’s right folks. Digg is down. I’m not sure why. But, at first you couldn’t even load Digg and now they have a page with all their hot topics and the title of the page says “Digg will be back soon!”.

While we’re getting the site back up and running… check out the latest news before we took the site offline. If there are updates during this outage we’ll keep you informed on the Digg Blog. Thanks for your patience!

Okay so its confirmed that Digg ran out of bandwidth. Or maybe that’s not the reason. I can’t tell what’s going on. I’ll look around and update you guys. So, stick around!

Oh and here’s a screenshot of the “Digg will be back soon” page.

Update (10 mins later): Digg is back up again. Yay!

Update again: Looks like Digg’s acting as if it never happened. I emailed them. No reply. Checked their blog. No post about this. Oh well.