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The DotNetKicks Effect - Enjoy While it Lasts

2/14/2008 12:24:59 PM

DotNetKicks is a great source to stay on track with latest .NET related developments, tutorials, tips, etc. It is also a great way to promote your .NET related articles or products. Here's a "kicked" article by Ryan Lanciaux about how cool it is for a small blog to get "kicked".

This is all true but if we can learn from digg (of which DotNetKicks is a clone) this is not going to last forever. To understand why let's analyze the only 2 ways how your article can get kicked/digged/whatever:

  1. Someone sees your article in the "upcoming stories" section of DotNetKicks and kicks it
  2. Someone reads the article on your site and presses the "kick it" button (if you have one)

Now those of you who read the "upcoming stories" section of DotNetKicks please stand up. Anyone? I don't. And judging from the quantity of hits I got to my articles submitted to DotNetKicks but not kicked to the front page I can assume that not more than 50 people do. Lets not fight about this number cause the actual number is not that important. What's important that only a small percentage of DotNetKicks readers read the "upcoming stories" too.

So this leaves us with only one actual way of getting kicked -- through the link on your own site. While the threshold of becoming "popular" on DotNetKicks is low (6 kicks?) it's ok. You can expect that out of 50 visitors to your small site 10% would bother to kick your article. But as DNK becomes more popular this bar would go higher to filter not that interesting stories which would inevitably grow in quantity the more popular the DNK becomes. So let's say the bar is raised to 30 and (if we assume that 10% of your visitors would kick your article) you'll need to have something like 300 readers already to get kicked to the front page.

You can see this effect on digg. For example to get your story about some gadget digged to "popularity" you have to be Engadget or Gizmodo or at least your article should be linked from some popular site(s) (or many less popular ones) before being digged. Here's a good article on the same subject by DownloadSquad.

So let's enjoy the great DotNetKicks while we can and while noise ratio there is low. It's not going to last forever. At least I don't have that much faith in humanity.

kick it on DotNetKicks.com

Update: read the follow-up: More on "The DotNetKicks Effect"

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2/14/2008 12:29:55 PM

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2/14/2008 5:19:45 PM

Jon von Gillern

While I've definitely seen the decline of digg, I think dotnetkicks is going to be different, simply because it has a very narrow scope, it is never going to get anywhere close to as large as digg. Digg is starting to suck because you get stories from every facet of life (ron paul, scientology, stupid funny photos/videos, George Bush is "the devil", etc) and they started to have problems letting people filter their idea of "interesting". If it it was able to manage to stick with just tech stuff and the occasional funny video, it would be awesome, but it doesn't, thats why I've started reading slashdot a lot more.

Jon von Gillern United States

2/14/2008 5:55:10 PM

ailon

Yes, from the point of reader DNK wont be as useless as digg is now. What I wanted to state is that guys like me or Ryan Lanciaux (who wrote original DNK traffic praise) wont be able to get to the frontpage without becoming "star" bloggers first. The problem is not in the subjects of DNK or digg but in the concept itself. Very few actually read upcoming stories pages and your chances of being dugg/kicked for writing a stupid article are much higher than chances of the other guys writing interesting stuff but having much less initial traffic than you. So eventually when the "popular" bar is raised "small" guys will get less and less frontpage hits.

ailon Lithuania

2/14/2008 11:13:10 PM

Yogesh

Hmmm. I think you guys are right, but the explanation is a little bit different, more close to Jon's version I should say. People normally get bored of sites like digg because they look for better source for newer and varied information. DNK is more of a programmer's reference site. Programmers would not stop visiting it because today or tomorrow they will definitely learn something new. And also, the number of visitors will also be lower than digg as programmers are fairly less than an average joe surfing the web. So potentiality of DNK becoming another digg is too far to even think about.

Yogesh India

2/14/2008 11:23:32 PM

John S.

Good .NET content will find its way to the home page no matter how big your blog is. Quality is paramount. I frequent the Upcoming stories page and never pick a story based on whether or not the blog is popular. I just want quality content and I'm assuming the majority of the Upcoming kickers feel the same way.

John S. United States

2/15/2008 12:14:03 AM

Tony Westfall

There are a lot of people that have RSS feeds for certain topics (such as Mono, Silverlight, etc) and will kick them if they have good content. This is another way stories can make it to the front page.

Tony Westfall United States

2/15/2008 12:20:40 AM

Chris Pietschmann

Like John S., I too frequent the Upcoming section of DNK. I think the majority of the stuff I Kick is from Upcoming. And, I don't even care who wrote it, just as long as its interesting, informative and a quality post.

Chris Pietschmann United States

2/15/2008 12:25:43 AM

Chris Pietschmann

Besides, DNK has one major feature that makes it way better than Digg. DotNetKicks has Tags! Digg sucks because you can't effectively filter down to the stories you're interested in. Taggin allows this, and DNK has it. I joined Digg in August 2005, and it was awesome; that is until the number of posts (and crappy posts) became overwhelming. I've been waiting for them to add Tagging for I think it's 1.5 years now, and I don't think Digg will ever have tagging. If there's one feature that DNK has that makes it better than Digg, it's not the smaller user base, it's Tagging!

Chris Pietschmann United States

2/15/2008 12:29:40 AM

Nannette

How did you add that kickit icon to your post? Your article interest me so I joined http://www.dotnetkicks.com/, but I can't find how to add the icon.

thanks!

Nannette United States

2/15/2008 12:37:57 AM

Morgan

I agree with every comment posted above in terms of DNK vs. Digg.  I would like to say though, that if DotNetKicks cleaned up their UI and made it more user friendly, I think this problem wouldn't even have been blogged about.  However, as it stands now, the above poster can't find how to make "Kick this" icons, and the "upcoming stories" link only shows up on the front page, and it's small and lost in the clutter.  UI needs updating guys!

Morgan Canada

2/15/2008 5:57:34 AM

Ryan Lanciaux

You do raise some valid concerns -- and I will agree that once a story gets on the front page, the number of hits seem to climb much faster than when its in the upcoming section. That being said, I believe that the users of DotNetKicks ultimately will be responsible for whether dnk goes the way of digg or stays a reliable source of information. My opinion is that because dnk is more focused (as others have said) it will have a much stronger chance of staying relevant. Additionally, I do read the upcoming section and I know some others do as well. Hopefully as the number of dnk users increase, so will the number of users that visit the upcoming section to find good content. I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens. Regards!

Ryan Lanciaux United States

2/15/2008 9:43:52 AM

ailon

@Nannette: There's a "Get KickIt image code" link right bellow the article summary

@all: I'm not debating the quality of DNK content. I'm just stating that linear digging/kicking concept is biased towards the big boys. I think I'll write another post about this.

ailon Lithuania

2/15/2008 11:16:51 AM

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2/15/2008 2:50:29 PM

Ryan Lanciaux

Ailon, I realize you're not trying to negate the quality of content. I look forward to your next post.

Ryan Lanciaux United States

2/22/2008 10:18:57 AM

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