The phenomena has been around for some time. It was previously called slashdotting. The principle is simple, someone writes something of interest, it’s brought to a large website’s attention, the server running the site can’t handle the traffic and the site finally gets taken down in one way shape or form.
It’s rough for a site owner since all you really want at the end of the day is traffic, but this is just too much of a good thing. The very interesting side effect though is that it ends up screwing up Digg just as much as the site owner.
Nobody likes going somewhere where you think you’ll find a great read and finding out that it’s down/gone. This ends up having a negative impact on Digg as well as the downed website. There’s no simple solution to this. As long as people like using the system, it will invariably need to send lots of people to target sites. Time-delaying so that they don’t flood sites won’t work since it will lessen the experience for Digg’s users.
It’s an interesting catch 22. Obviously many have commented on the problems for webmasters but not many have discussed the implications for the link aggregator itself. Obviously the benefits far outweigh the penalties or else Digg would have gone under a long time ago. Could caching be the answer? I know a lot of webmasters that would hate that idea. What about opt-in caching? If you have any suggestions or thoughts, I’d love to hear them.
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