Dig is a social network. It's hard enough to crack the chicken-egg problem of getting enough users when you don't have a critical mass of users to attract them in the first place. But that's exactly what new social networks do. Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Hubski, and countless others. It's difficult, but it's what must be done. What I'm most interested in is what happens when a social network becomes a graveyard. Are there any examples of social networks that saw their user-base demolished, but were able to turn it around and get them to return en masse? There must be a significant example or two, but I'm coming up blank. Trying to bring users back to an abandoned network might be more difficult than building a new network from scratch. That being said, I'm not sure exactly what the numbers are on Digg as far as traffic. Maybe they aren't as mortally wounded as the tech press made them out to be.
- Are there any examples of social networks that saw their user-base demolished, but were able to turn it around and get them to return en masse? There must be a significant example or two, but I'm coming up blank.
I can't think of any. It's interesting to see the comments on Digg about this. I never used Digg, so I don't know the whole story, but it was pretty obvious that their v4 roll-out was a huge mistake. EDIT: The discussion on HN is far more interesting than the one on Digg. EDIT2: This discussion on Reddit is interesting too.
More cynically, it may also have been media puppet accounts that were chasing the eyeballs from Digg to Reddit.