Thursday, February 5, 2009

Open Letter To A Digg Poweruser: or, WTF? My One-Legged Girlfriend Has a Nasty Unibrow! LOL!!!

Dear Sir, Madam or Robot,

Hello, I am a third-tier blogger. I've been trying hard to grow my readership and I hoped "the digg" could help.


However, every time I write a humorous, or (gasp!) thoughtful piece and try to have it dugg, I invariably end up with only a handful of diggs. Then some dude will comment, "Great piece... too bad it will never see the light of the homepage because of all the Powerusers. Har! Har! Har!"

So I ask you, Poweruser... Who are you? What do you want? And what kind of sick world do you come from?

You see, I'm not angry at you for being so powerful. I'm just trying to understand you... Every land has its kings; I get it. Do you get anywhere by fighting the king? Not with 24 "mutual friends" you don't!

So, lets just take my recent piece as an example.

I watched in dismay as my little "skit" languished under a picture of a man's unibrow and 40 submissions from Cracked.com. Apparently, Powerusers love unibrows and "cracked" has many interns with digg accounts. Lesson learned.

I then watched as a picture of a girl with one leg gained over 6000 Diggs!

I didn't understand what was going on, until I saw a horse's head sticking out from a well behind the girl. The head was circled in red with the letters WTF? scrawled over it.

No doubt, this made me chuckle. And indeed, it's quite possible that while looking at my screen I shook my head in dismay and reflexively mouthed the words, "What The Fuck?" I mean, truly, "what the fuck" is that horse doing there? And what happened to the girls leg? So many questions!

Perhaps it's the mystery of the photo that led to the amazing amount of diggs? From this can we infer that Powerusers are intrigued by all of life's mysteries?

Or is it as simple as people wanting to take a quick look at a picture of a sunken horse/one-legged girl say, "I Digg that" and move on? Could it be there is no Poweruser conspiracy?

If so, does this in some way prove what my father-in-law is always telling me about popular "culture?" That "American Idol" and celebrity worship exist because "that's what people want" and not because there's some grand conspiracy to dumb Americans down and shift their attention from what's really important?

I hope not... because it's much easier for me to want to blame a small group of powerful people than for me to blame humanity in general.

Your humble third-tier blogger,
Dinosaur Trader

10 comments:

Complacent Panda said...

I'll go with conspiracy.

Otherwise, the world is much too scary for me to handle...I mean, people actually liking American Idol? Come on!

Susan Critelli said...

"Great piece... too bad it will never see the light of the homepage because of all the Powerusers. Har! Har! Har!"

For one thing, you shouldn't be submitting your own stuff. I hear that is a no-no.

Dinosaur Trader said...

Hmmm... really?

I need to hire a "ghost submitter."

-DT

Anonymous said...

Of course there's a conspiracy. Humanity has always been about control and power hungry people taking out their sexual frustrations on the masses.

More like power-hungry diggers..

Anonymous said...

Powerful stuff.

BTW, what is digg?

Anonymous said...

...and great read, I might add.

wincity said...

DT,

I read you blog daily, sorry I never digged you. I did try a few times but it asked me to register. It feels juvenile to me to register to digg somebody. Even a little gay, no?

Most of your readers are probably traders who're probably not into diggs. Wonder why you're interested?

Dinosaur Trader said...

Just another way to build traffic, Win.

-DT

Trader-X said...

I heard that everytime someone diggs your post, an angel gets a beer.

Anonymous said...

Lol, i'm a trader and I occassionially digg.
I have a netvibes widget that only shows me the most dugg stuff and i only ever care about images because I dont expect through provoking articles on digg.
Sure it's a great way to get publicity but if anyone else thinks of digg as just a quick snapshot of current quick entertainment while waiting for something like me, then insightful articles will never hit the front page.