Cracking the Digg comment code: An experiment

March 11th, 2007 | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

As far as stereotypes go, I am probably your “average” Digg user. I am 23, male, and I have my own blog. Since joining Digg in Feb. 2006, I have dugg 215 stories while only submitting 16 (I only started submitting fairly recently), none of which made the front page. I have long been fascinated by the dynamics of the commenting system on Digg, so last night I concocted a little experiment to see if I could crack the comment code. It’s no Copernican revolution, but it was pretty successful. Here’s how it worked.

I have seen The most dugg up comment on Digg as well as The most hated comment on Digg, and several other front page stories here and there regarding comments. Reading these stories and perusing the comments of many other Digg stories made two things very clear. If you want a comment to have lots and lots of diggs, the comment must (1) be submitted early, usually before the story hits the front page and (2) be funny or witty.

Until recently, I thought the the first or second commenters on a given story were just Upcoming Stories dwellers; every time a new story came up, they would comment and hope that it generated enough diggs to make it to the front page. Who knows, those people could be out there. But that method would not do for my experiment. I needed something that was more or less guaranteed to hit the front page. The “Hot in All Topics” column of the Upcoming Stories page served quite nicely. Late last night I chose two of the stories from that column and entered my comments.

When I woke up, I checked the results. One of the stories made the front page and the other died after about 45 diggs. The front page story was R-Rated ‘300′ Stampeding Towards $60 Mil Weekend; Record For Biggest March, and its description read as follows:

Here come The Spartans! I’m told Warner Bros.’ much-buzzed 300 about the ancient Battle of Thermopylae (even though most of target audience fell asleep in school during that history lesson) looks set to shatter the record for biggest March opening ever. This “Gladiator Lite” raked in $27.7 million Friday night.

At the time of my comment, the story had about 50 diggs, taking care of the first key to digg commenting success (commenting before the story hits the front page). Now I just needed to be witty. Here’s what I settled on:

“(even though most of target audience fell asleep in school during that history lesson)”…?

History was the only subject that didn’t suck.

It worked. The comment has received 49 diggs at the time of this writing. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if the comment would backfire or not (do Digg users generally despise history?).

The other story on which I commented (Logins are More Secure with Typing Rhythm Recognition) has only received 46 diggs, while my respective comment has received 9 diggs. Even though it’s the most dugg comment on that story, it’s really too bad the story didn’t make the front page, because I thought this comment was funnier.

Now, I realize that there are other ways in which comments might receive lots of diggs. This general method, however, seems to work over and over again for many different people. Heck, try it yourself and let me know if it works for you.