This is the second article in a three part series where I discuss the relevance of the term “website” effect. The first article is here. When I discuss the term Digg effect I am speaking of the situation where a small site that doesn’t get very many visits per day suddenly gets hammered when a link to one of their pages makes it to the front page of Digg.

I have been visiting Digg for a while and there were a lot of times I was unable to visit a website due to the Digg effect. This happened more in the past and it has been happening less and less as time went on. There can be a few reasons for this. The first reason that everyone is going to jump on and say is Digg v4 came out and it’s now just popular websites RSS feeds; this reason might have some credibility, but I have noticed a drop in the Digg effect before v4 came out. In v3 the content seemed to be from popular websites that could handle the Digg traffic. The next reason could be because the site became more mainstream and less tech niche oriented. A final reason could be the submitters ran out of interesting niche stories and fell back to submitting the news.

The first reason was probably true at first, but they have seemed to fix the algorithm well enough that the stories hitting the front page are very close to the v3 days. The second reason is definitely founded. In 2007-2008 there were a lot of stories based on the election (Ron Paul anyone?). After that the site became more mainstream and the websites that Digg linked to were more popular and could handle the traffic. The final reason is something that I like to think is true; the people who submit to Digg are too efficient, it’s my feeling that they have scoured the entire Internet looking for niche, interesting, unique stories and websites that they simply ran out of content, and now the things that make it to the front page can handle the users.

Like in the previous post, I’ll give a straight answer to the question that was posed in the title. No, I do not believe the Digg effect is still relevant because I rarely have come across something on the front page that has been down and had to go hunting through the comments to find a mirror.