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I hope DZone fixes the screen size problem on the left side.

We've got a lot of neat things planned for the near future. Stay Tuned!

Improved mobile site would be awesome, too. I spend a lot of my dzone time on my G1 but it's a bummer to miss out on the comments and voting...

Not certain why a digg button is such a pain. Keep in mind that the button is for your users and not you. If they think you provide something that they deem worthy of being shared with others, then it is an easy way for them to submit it to their favorite bookmark/social network; in this case, digg.

The point is not to have or not have the button itself, it's more around what is the point at all if the majority of Digg readers aren't focussing on this type of content, and more interested in images of a dog spooning a cat or whatever... I'm saying that just because Digg is an A-Lister when it comes to social media, it doesn't necessarily mean you need to tool up your site to support it, inline with the hundred or so other social media outlets that are similar...

DZone and my audience are on a similar wavelength, so it's a nicer, more applicable fit...

I agree, you shouldn't let your personal opinions and likes/dislikes of Digg influence whether or not you have it. I'll take any opportunity to get traffic, unless the referring site is offensive in some way - I have no idea what the upside of not having it is. Also, Digg is so big that not having it will look like a glaring omission.

still not getting it I think... My point is, the content on Digg that gets through and "dugg" nowdays is not the content I am serving... so there is no point in having a button as far as I'm concerned. It doesn't have anything to do with my opinion of Digg at all... It's science baby

May be so, but how would you know? Are you tracking the visits from Digg and finding they're hurting you in some way? My point is you never know and should not prejudge. These days things are interconnected like you will not believe and so very rapidly evolving. Compare Twitter today to a year back.

All I know is every single one of the 80 articles I have posted have never gone anywhere... the most referring about 3-4 visits. If Digg turns that around (I am continuing to publish to Digg), then great, welcome back button - until that time, there is no point at all.

Digg cannot turn that around since its a general public site, so specialized topix from one domain wont ever get as many votes as one would like to,

so those article will never be popular there and hence will also not reach the target audience since they dont rise up in popularity ever.

i gave up on Digg many years ago.

Exactly - you're 100% right there!

Hi AllureFX,

It's not true that "you never know" when you can clearly and specifically track inbound referrals in any modern web analytics system. Mootymoots observed that DZone sends him more than 20 times as much traffic as Digg, and that is WITHOUT the benefit of having a DZone button on his links!

I don't think the issue is whether a Digg button is "hurting" but rather whether it is "helping" materially? I can't tell you how many times I have noticed that a really interesting link goes nowhere on Digg, while at DZone the same link will get promoted and receive good attention.

This, I believe, is due to the fact that developers are relatively rare in the broad, general population. Lots of people may be interested in the latest shenanigans of Britney Spears or Rihanna, but only developers will be interested in whether the new version of Library XYZ achieves performance and reliability benefits of 6% or 8%.

There's only so much space available on a page for promotion, and if you use it ineffectively, then your promotion will not generate optimal results. When it comes to promoting developer links, a Digg button may be less effective than a DZone button. In a toss-up between the two, shouldn't the blogger pick the one which is likely to yield the best results?

Rick

Guys, don't make this a Digg vs. DZone for developers, because it's not - you can have both Digg and DZone buttons.

The question is: should I have a Digg button or not? Pretty much all I've heard (read) so far is: posting on Digg isn't really useful. OK, but what's the downside of putting a Digg button anyway? Say I go to the blog through a DZone link, love it, and see a Digg button. I'm a regular Digg user, so I'm going to click on that button. Let's say after all that, the Digg post gets upvoted to only 20 and results in only 5 clickbacks. So what? Why not take the 5 clicks? One of those could be from an investor that changes your career.

So, somebody please tell me what the downside is. The OP said he's still posting to Digg, so he's not saving time - that would've been one upside to not bothering with Digg (the few seconds saved). You could also argue I guess you'll save some space by removing the Digg icon. But come on, you can't be serious.

BTW, it's not like Digg doesn't work for any tech articles. See http://digg.com/programming - there're quite a few with over 1000 diggs on the first page. Now look at http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/ - the best one has 153 votes. Tell me which is a better bet.

Digg is the pop culture air-head site of the Internet - often times its far worse than the supermarket National Enquirer ilk

I agree, the quality of people using the Digg site is much, much lower than a site like Dzone or even Delicious. The Digg users seem to be so negative, too, whereas DZone users overall seem much more...happy?

totally agree there... even reddit is going the way of digg with the negativity...

Not sure about Reddit or Digg, but here we rule the queue with an iron fist... more stuff get blocked for being off topic than gets allowed in

Maybe that keeps people more positive (though sometimes it's hard to keep my own spirits up with the amount of guff I have to read -- and block) ;-)

You're doing a cracking job :-)

Bloïd aka Hawkeye :-)

I really agree dzone is only programming...but digg is not like that.

Digg == Mafia

Dugg down for pointlessness.

Oops, wrong site...

Yeah! DZone is great!