Research suggests that DriveBy Digging on Digg, where users dig without reading the linked stories, is likely common. Evidence includes a webmaster’s post receiving Diggs despite their site crashing and a screenshot showing Digg founder Kevin Rose digging three stories in a short amount of time.
There has been considerable speculation accusing Digg users of DriveBy Digging, digging without actually reading the stories they are linked to. We did a little more research and you might be surprised at what we found.
We know of a webmaster who claims that even after his website crashed due to the Digg effect, his post continued to receive Diggs. His site was completely down for over an hour, but his Digg count was still rapidly increasing. He interpreted this as evidence that many Diggers dig up stories even if they haven’t read them. While this is probably accurate, we decided we needed a little more proof of DriveBy Digging.
To gather the required data, we spent some time with Digg Spy, monitoring Digg activity in real time. We unchecked all the checkboxes except “show dugg stories”. Even with these restrictions, new lines are added at a rate of about one every two seconds (even faster at peak times of the day).
While this might not count as absolute proof, we think the following screenshot (taken at 6:44am PST on April 10, 2007) serves as a great illustration of DriveBy Digging. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it:
You might be surprised to learn that Digg founder ‘kevinrose’ dug three stories into this single screenshot! When considering how quickly this page is updated, it seems likely that Kevin Rose himself committed DriveBy Digging. Also note that two other users each dug up two stories in this short amount of time. We are confident that even with the fast internet connection, it would be impossible to read three stories and then dig into them in such a short amount of time. While it’s possible that users read the stories and came back to Digg to do the digging, we don’t find that very likely.
MYTH: Plausible – DriveBy Digging is probably quite common.
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