This is a very insightful article, and I'm impressed with how much work the author put into getting something onto the front page of digg. If I were looking for somebody to do effective online PR, I'd be looking for somebody like this.
I think it's somewhat sad that digg is so huge now that it takes so much effort to get people to pay attention to an interesting link, and I'd be interesting in seeing if there were any way to counteract the user fragmentation that occurs as a social news site gets popular. Reddit-like categories seem to be one solution, but it seems more like a band-aid than a total solution.
I think it would be better to create a site that embraces the user fragmentation. I want to create a news aggregation site that provides a different set of articles for each user.
Except that there are no interesting links on digg any more. It is close to 100% blog spam. Sites like this have to stay small to be useful - it's sad but the same thing will happen to HN if it gets too many readers. Luckily these type of sites are easy to set up so if HN ever goes bad an alternative will appear :)
Personally I am completely baffled by people who think it's an achievement to increase their rank/karma etc.
I think it's somewhat sad that digg is so huge now that it takes so much effort to get people to pay attention to an interesting link, and I'd be interesting in seeing if there were any way to counteract the user fragmentation that occurs as a social news site gets popular. Reddit-like categories seem to be one solution, but it seems more like a band-aid than a total solution.