Once an old iPod story on kottke.org got Dugg, visitors streamed to the story; then Slashdot picked up the story and the fun really began.
The death of Slashdot has been opined on several sites online. Newcomer Digg with its fervent userbase submitting and voting on stories, has the crucifix, the garlic necklace, and the pointy stake in hand, ready to take Slashdot to the crossroads and bury it forever.
But the power of Slashdot, as experienced by those unfortunate site admins who’ve watched helplessly as the Slashdot Effect vaporized servers and consumed a month’s worth of bandwidth in a matter of minutes, is a mighty power, and as Jason Kottke found through some intrepid sleuthing, that power lasts for quite a while.
Through a couple of graphs, Kottke showed how traffic spiked as the story in question appeared on Digg, then on Slashdot. He does carefully note that the link from Digg hit the Digg front page late on a Saturday (in the US) while the Slashdot link hit its front page midday on Sunday.
“Digg might be at somewhat of a disadvantage here and this is perhaps not an apples to apples comparison,” he wrote in the post.
With that comparison in mind, the Digg traffic delivered about 20,000 visitors in a four-day period to the page on his site. Slashdot’s traffic sent some 84,100 visitors to the same page, over three days. Since that time, traffic has stayed up on Kottke’s site overall, by some 15,000 more visitors a day than normal, he wrote.
Slashdot isn’t dying, and may be benefiting from Digg as an infusion of new blood. Kottke thinks the iPod story would never have appeared on Slashdot without making it on Digg first. “Bottom line: if the iPod thing, which is several months old, hadn’t been Dugg, it would not have appeared on Slashdot the next day.”
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
