Over the past couple weeks, I’ve noticed fewer and fewer Ron Paul-related stories on the front page of Digg. Maybe Kevin Rose had the monkeys tweak the algorithm a little more? Nah, more likely they were out drinking beers.
To test my anecdotal observation that the Paulite obsession with Digg had subsided, I searched the site for “Paul” — “Ron Paul” is barely possible; Digg’s search function has never recovered from an “upgrade” from earlier this year — going back one week’s time.
Sure enough, just two stories involving Ron Paul had been made “popular” — with enough Diggs and comments to warrant front-paging — in the past week. As of 11:00 p.m. EDT, at 12 stories per page, by my count that’s 204 stories mentioning “Paul” (though some, admittedly, were about Paul Reubens’ latest comeback) that went absolutely nowhere.
The second-most popular was a Wired feature story about “how a fringe politician took over the web,” with 833 diggs. As if to prove the point, the only other popular story was about the congressman’s “Federal Reserve Board Abolition Act,” with some 1749 diggs.
And that was last Thursday. Compared to the cornucopia of Ron Paul stories following his breakout second debate, this is nothing. Where has the movement gone?
Fear not: the Paulites haven’t gone away, they’ve only shifted their focus. But the Paul Machine never really loved Digg. You could say they never really dugg it. Their participation was always contingent on making a point, and whether it’s done Paul any good or not, trust me, it has been duly noted.
Meantime, I’ll be digging yet another story about the iPhone.
Note: Standard FDT disclosure; as usual, all observations are my own.
P.S. AOAMO? Ugh. That’ll never work.
The bury brigade won — it is a waste of clicks to digg Paul stories.
I had an RP story go popular within several hours yesterday, and have gotten nearly 3200 diggs for the Federal Reserve bill. You are right that there aren’t as many RP stories submitted to Digg nowaday. The search is all messed up too, even my stories that made the front page don’t show up. His overall Internet numbers are still growing though. I think folks have also taken to other methods and are busy attending Meetups and events. They still stop by Digg, as evidenced by the 3,200 Diggs, but just don’t submit as many stories. Plus, I noticed that some of the sites got knocked out of Google blog rankings so perhaps the reduction in traffic to their sites induced the folks to pursue those other methods.
I just got renewed today, Republican so I can vote for RP in the caucuses. I have no landline that I answer and have no cell phone, so I’ll never show up in any polls except the ones on the Internet and the ones that really matter.
I agree, Digg is pointless at this time. I still Digg stories there occasionally, but they never show up on page 1, no matter how many Diggs there are.
How convenient that the search function is broken… That was how I was finding stories after they stopped appearing on the front page.
We have moved on. Meetup.com is where the action is right now.