The Digg Effect
The last 4 hours have seen me go through several emotions, excitement, shock, despair, frustration, to name but a few. After submitting one of my most popular articles (101 Atheist Quotes) to the atheism subreddit, it managed to climb its way to the top link. It also made it onto the reddit homepage if “atheism” was a category selected. This was exciting.
In the short space of an hour, 7000 people managed to connect to the site. Due to a badly configured file in the apache config, the entire server overloaded and crashed. After fixing the file, the server continued to run very slowly. A look at the logs showed a large amount of incoming traffic from Digg. With hesitation, I loaded up the Digg homepage, and saw the 101 Atheist Quotes article, with 487 votes. This was a combination of shock, excitement, terror, and despair.
The server was undergoing what is commonly referred to as “The Digg Effect”. Essentially a massive influx of visitors caused by an article being featured on Digg. The server promptly crashed again under the pressure, with PHP and Apache complaining about everything. This was frustrating, but we managed to get rid of the plugins that were causing the problem. At the same time we hastily installed the WP-Super-Cache plugin to help with the load.
Some hours later, the article had reached 850 votes, and it finally got pushed off the home page of Digg. This slowed down the traffic by a lot, but the votes were still going up, and only time will tell where it goes from here. Currently it has 976 votes, and is on the second page of the top last 24 hours section.
Of course, the kicker about this is that I didn’t even submit this to Digg (at least not this time). My original submission, made back in Febrary, managed to get around 36 diggs. This new submission was made by
Hopefully I got some new subscribers out of it, but I’m at least proud to say that other than a few errors, I survived the Digg effect in one piece!
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[...] It seems that someone noticed what I wrote about reddit:atheism and decided to submit all his posts to reddit 1 which led to one of them being resubmitted to digg which ended with their server going b0nkers. [...]
A chain reaction of popularity » A Division by Zer0
25 Aug 08 at 9:19 am (GMT)
How about:
How do I know I exist? Maybe I’m a jellyfish on some distant planet, and the earth, the people, the history and current events I see and believe in, are all just a figment of my imagination.
You live by faith just like the rest of us.
Martin23
25 Aug 08 at 8:45 pm (GMT)
Your article is also in the main page of meneame the Spanish Diggs version.
Good work!
Keil
25 Aug 08 at 11:34 pm (GMT)
Very cute.
Regarding the jellyfish, you’re correct its your imagination.
Regarding the rest, we have evidence. No need for faith.
The evidence may be used to determine what is most likely. It is very likely that you exist.
History is recorded in a manner consistent with various perspectives and sources. It is much more likely to be accurate than those claims that have lesser or no such substantive foundations.
Ben Abbott
26 Aug 08 at 1:48 am (GMT)