Mad Atoms

Just about every Advertising company, Marketer, SEO rep and blogger is trying to unlock the secrets of Digg and to my delight, failing. Well, the cats out of the bag because the big “secret” of Digg is to spend a shit load of time on Digg (a devious scheme devised by the Digg developers no doubt). “Digg” like there is no tomorrow, “Friend” like it’s your last day on earth and “Comment” like your mentally unstable wife just caught you in bed with another woman. And let me stop you right there before you jump on Digg and add the first 10,000 people you see because I guarantee the only people who’ll become your “mutual friend” will be dickhead spammers such as yourself.  

Just like with anything, it’s not “What you know, but who you know.” Your network of “friends” will be your base. Take care of them (Digg, comment and sometimes shout) and they will take care of you. But how do you know how good of a friend they’ll be before you add them? Well here are some unwritten rules of adding friends on Digg that will come in handy: 

1) Do not add any friends with a foreign name – This goes double for Asians and triple for anyone from the Philippines (country code PH). They will almost with 100% certainty be spammers for a site that A) isn’t even in English and B) sells ringtones.

My “Fans” page is filled with people whose names I cannot pronounce. Forgive me if I come off as racist when I say STAY AWAY FROM ME YOU FILTHY SPAMMING FOREIGNERS.

2) Do not add any friends that are women – Well, more specifically women who have hot sounding names like Ashley, Melissa or Brittany and have a picture of “themselves” as their Icon. That is not them. In fact, it’s probably a dude from the Philippines whose figured out that he has to trick people into friending them (see point #1). The picture is likely from Myspace, Maxim magazine or a porn that the real “Tiffany” has probably masturbated to. Stay away from any profile that has a picture of something that remotely gives you a chub.  

3) Diggs vs. Submissions Ratio – When looking at a potential friend’s history check out the number of Diggs and compare them to the number of submissions. The ideal digger will have a high amount of Diggs with a low amount of submissions. And even if someone has a huge amount of Diggs, I still consider people who have over 10 submissions a day to be like a high maintenance girlfriend: fun for a while but they’ll eventually wear you down and dump you for someone else who can give them more free shit (in this case, a massive amounts of Diggs).  

4) Don’t target users without pictures – If they are too lazy to take 40 seconds to add an interesting picture, then they’re more often than not too lazy to be a reliable friend.

5) Quality over Quantity- If you’re going to be looking at your friends’ submissions most of the time, you might as well make sure they’re interesting. Check out what kind of stories they submit and if they’re all from Rush Limbaugh’s website and low quality tech blogs, you should probably take a pass on friendship while simultaneously burying all their Neo-Con propaganda behind their backs.