Mklopez was an icon of Digg’s social power. 
In December 2004, Digg founder Kevin Rose demoed his just-launched news aggregation site on the tech television show Screen Savers. Miguel Lopez happened to be watching, and decided to create a Digg account on a lark. And thus one of Digg’s most visible power users, mklopez, was born.
“I can tell you, it was fun. The term ‘gaming Digg’ was frequently used to describe cheating the system and trying to get your stories to the front page, but ‘game’ in my case was appropriate because it was a lot of fun,” Lopez told Wired.
The fun started almost immediately. After signing up, Lopez started digging content he liked, and his submissions were hitting the Digg front page. Those initial homepage wins garnered Lopez thousands of followers, and all that social clout — along with Lopez’s interactions with other Digg users via instant messaging and email — made support from the screen name “mklopez” extremely valuable to sites trying to secure Digg referral traffic.
Lopez’s Digg persona was so influential, in fact, sites began offering payments for his Digg support. But Lopez told Wired he was never interested in the money: “I always cut down on anyone who contacted me with business propositions way before any dollar amount was mentioned.”
The fun continued until the summer of 2010 when the whole Digg system began to unravel. The Digg version 4 overhaul only made matters worse with its plan to tightly integrate Digg with social networks Facebook and Twitter. Before the redesign went live, Digg CEO Jay Adelson spoke with Wired about how the new site would work: “Whenever somebody diggs something, favorites something or tweets something, all of those are calls to action that say, ‘Hey, this is something that might be particularly relevant to you right now.’”
Unfortunately, the new site strategy wasn’t relevant to many Digg users. Digg continued to bleed users and traffic as people flocked to Twitter and Facebook as sources for viral news. The whole situation came to a head on Friday when it was announced that Betaworks bought Digg, and that the technology behind Digg’s voting system would be used to power the relatively unknown site news.me.
For Miguel Lopez, Digg was always more about exploring community than wielding power. Community managers at websites large and small hoped to develop relationships with mklopez and his power-user brethren like MrBabyMan and Zaibatsu. And Digg’s biggest power users were also revered as social media gurus to be emulated — their methods could goose a brand’s traffic, and, by extension, its ad dollars.
But Lopez never cashed in on his Digg king-making abilities. Lopez told Wired: “I never was a paid-for submitter. Digg was never more than a fun hobby. I have a regular day job, and was never interested in dropping that to become a Digg gamer or social news guru. Yes, I got offers to get paid, or even to make it a full-time job, but never saw the appeal.”
Lopez may not have been a for-profit Diggster, and he always worked within Digg’s established rules, but he still concedes that Digg was his game of choice. “It was my favorite game,” he says. “The algorithm was always changing and you couldn’t do anything about it. You had to change your strategy every month and sometimes every week to get on the front page.”
Lopez is quick to point out that among power users during Digg’s heydays of 2007-2009, he had a success rate of only 10 percent — meaning just 10 percent of his submissions hit the site’s front page (his “popular ratio” stat has since increased to 19 percent now that the Digg economy has crashed). Lopez adds that MrBabyMan had a 50 percent success rate during the same period.
Still, even a 10 percent popular ratio must have required real work, right? Lopez says every day of the week, he spent about 10 minutes every three to four hours trying to get his submissions to hit the front page of Digg. And even this didn’t include time spent searching for articles worthy of submission. “I guess [total time spent] was about an hour a day” Lopez told Wired. Still, he continued to play the game, adjusting his strategy as Digg changed its algorithm.
At one point, his strategy involved trying to get strangers to digg an article. Other times, he would try to evenly space out his diggs over a 24-hour period. Lopez even toyed with only submitting one article a day — a reaction, perhaps, to Digg’s proprietors trying to de-emphasize the clout of power users. But above anything else, Lopez told Wired that he tried to find new, interesting sites and content to submit to Digg. “I would do Google searches of random words,” he said, “and a few times I found weird blogs that deserved an audience, and would post to Digg. A few of those sites started getting regular traffic.”
Lopez believes the online comics The Oatmeal and XKCD were propelled to public relevance thanks to Digg power users. And, to this end, Lopez says it’s unfair to blame power users like himself for destroying Digg. If anything, Lopez says, power users were essential to Digg’s success, and once the company started diminishing their influence, the site effectively shot itself in the foot:
“Sure, Digg would have preferred if that great content were submitted by several thousand different users, but the fact is that just that small group of people were willing to take the time and effort to submit, and then they were basically told ‘Thank you, but no more.’”
So what of Digg’s fall from grace? “Honestly I felt sad,” Lopez told us. “It’s one of the children of the Web 2.0 revolution. The most interesting thing I got was meeting people — so many interesting guys and girls that ran blogs or used Digg.”
Lopez notes that many of his Digg friends are now on Twitter and Facebook, and they all now correspond through those platforms. So, yes, even the Digg faithful have moved on to other social networks — which really has been Digg’s biggest problem all along.
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/mklopez-digg-power-user-interview/
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