Digg-like and social bookmarking, list and source code

Here is a list of the most popular digg-likes, to acquire knowledge and to promote your best pages too.

Digg-likes reserved to members of another website as MySpace for example, are not listed.

List of general-purpose aggregators

• digg.com/
• The pionner that given its to all other: digglike.
  The traffic was declining for various reasons, I guess adverts hidden among titles, and preference given to some big sites. With the version 4 of the design, users migrated massively to other sites such as Reddit. But this did not convince the owner to return to the previous one!
  That is the contrary of a site like Slashdot that never changed its old design even if it completely broken.

• reddit.com/
• News are displayed as a simple list of titles without description. Lots of comments. Subreddits allow to build your own digg-like with selected types of infos otherwise you may get a photo of the cat of each redditor around, and many childish comments about anything but also sometimes (rarely) well documented comments.
  You can select subreddits with a list of + followed by names of subfolders you want, ex:
  http://www.reddit.com/r/+pics+deapthsub+funny+science+videos+worldnews+todayilearned+technology
  And you may create a bookmark of that.
• https://voat.co
• Similar to Reddit.
  
• www.fark.com/
• Sacarstic aggregator with comments.
• www.videosift.com/
• The site offers a selection of videos from Youtube and Google Video.
• www.newsgarbage.com/
• About technologies.
• snapzu.com/list/
• Good content and community and lot of functionalities.
• https://empeopled.com/
• Upvotes are really useful on the long term on this site.
• hubski.com/
• Another digg-like.
• https://spreadit.io/
• With subdirs like Reddit.
• www.theneeds.com/
• More focused on topics.

Digg-likes for webmasters

Useful to visit and get knolwledge, and to promote a website provided it is aimed at webmasters and web developers.

• www.cssdrive.com/
• Votes for the design of websites.
• designrfix.com/
• Submit a new about Web design to be displayed in the sidebar.
• designbump.com/
• Web design and graphics.
• www.designfloat.com/
• Digg-like about web design.
• www.protolize.org/
• Web tools. If you like one, add it to the list and vote for tools.

For developers

• www.dzone.com/
• Digg-like for developers.
• devsnippets.com/
• Display articles about design and snippets, submitted by developers.
• dotnetkicks.com/
• For DotNet programmers.
• https://news.ycombinator.com/
• Mainly about programming, frameworks, etc... A place to discovers new tools.

Social bookmarking

The idea of making public his favorites and share them with others have been made popular by the del.icio.us website, bought by Yahoo and became delicious.com. It has many imitators.
In fact the idea of social bookmarking was widespread and is found in social networks, and some digg-likes work similarly.

• www.bloglines.com/
• Feed manager. Flow manager, resold by Yahoo! in 2010.
• www.blogmarks.net/
• Similar to delicious.
• delicious.com
• Was founded in 2003 and bought by Yahoo in 2005. Sold again by Yahoo! in 2011. Claims more than five million users. Nofollow, no index, just for personnal bookmarks.
• www.diigo.com/
• Goes further than other sites because it allows you to mark parts of a page added to favorites.
  Merged with furl.net that was founded in 2003 and bought in 2004 by Looksmart.
• www.folkd.com/
• 43 millions websites for now. Do follow.
• givealink.org/
• Non-commercial site aimed at complying with social networks.
• www.mister-wong.com/
• European site created in March 2006 by Kai Tietjen in germany.
• www.stumbleupon.com
• Communities based on shared interests. Bought in May 2007 by eBay for $ 75 millions.

Criticism of digg-likes

Lot of digg-like were closed because of spam. Not stupid spam from webmasters who submit all post from their site, but the more subtle spam from group of bloggers who trade promotion on social sites as well as that of the fake accounts.
In June 2012, Reddit banned links on sites as prestigious as Business Week, Physorg, The Atlantic, because they have organized networks of clicks to promote their articles.

We know how using multiple accounts on Wikipedia can allow to manipulate the contents of a collaborative site. The same manipulations exist on digg-likes that bring the most visitors.
These practices are the cause of the decline of sites like Digg and probably in a near future Reddit too.
Submitting your best posts is worth so far. If they are quality they can please readers and appear on the front page and then get backlinks.

And these are not the owners of these sites who can blame them. In June 2012, Steve Huffman, co-founder of Reddit, revealed that in its early days, the site was populated by hundreds of fake accounts created by them only to give the impression that the site have contributors!

How works a digg-like

One can found on the web the entire source code of a site of this type, and also numerous articles on their operation.

• Bookmarkly is the source code of the bookmarkly.com site.
• Monocle is a link and news aggregator whose source code is available on GitHub, and which provide an interface similar to that of reddit.
• Code of connotea.org is open sourced. Was created in 2004 for scientists but available for all.
• The Hacker News ranking algorithm is a simple formula that depends on the number of votes and the time elapsed since the submission.
• The Reddit ranking algorithm has the added effect of negative votes. The novelty is also a more important factor. Submitted links are often downvoted by competitors to promote their own links and go to spam basket.