Digg-like, list and technique

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. See at this Adsense FAQ, to see how money a such site can make. But not all imitators will make the money!
  The traffic is declining for various reasons, I guess adverts among titles, and preference to some big sites.

• 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, plus lot of stupid reasonings about religion that apply physical laws to spiritual things.
  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 can create a bookmark of that.
  
• www.fark.com/
• Sacarstic aggregator with comments.
• news.ycombinator.com/
• Hackers News is IT focused with some posts of general topics.
• www.videosift.com/
• The site offers a selection of videos from Youtube and Google Video.
• www.newsgarbage.com/
• About technologies.
• www.hubski.com/topsubs/
• Created to compete with reddit.com whose contributions are less and less useful, according to the creator.

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.
• www.bloodee.com/
• For horror.

For developers

• www.dzone.com/
• Digg-like for developers.
• devsnippets.com/
• Display articles about code in sidebar, submitted by developers.
• dotnetkicks.com/
• For DotNet programmers.

Press releases

To promote a new product, to inform people of important announces, post a short article on these websites.
According to PR Web: "Used by organizations or all size to increase the visibility of their news, improve their search engine rankings and drive traffic to their Web site"

• express-press-release.net/
• Submit you press releases at no charge.
• www.free-press-release.com/
• Free Press Release Marketing Service Online.
• www.goarticles.com/
• Submitting articles with lot of services to retrieve articles and resources.
• www.ideamarketers.com/
• Get traffic link popularity.
• www.pr9.net/
• Free press release submissions with some main categories: computer, business, science, society, etc.

Criticism

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 is made a digg-like

• Bookmarkly is the source code of the bookmarkly.com site.
• Code of connotea.org is open sourced. Was created in 2004 for scientists but available for all.
• How the Hacker News ranking algorithm works
  It's a simple formula that depends on the number of votes and the time elapsed since the submission.
• How the Reddit ranking algorithm works
  Compared to H.N. it 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.

See also

• List of social bookmarking sites.