So yesterday we were on digg for our recent launch of client site SimplyFired.com. Obviously we are really proud of the work we did for them and don’t mind the attention, but what is with the Digg user base? Don’t get me wrong, it is nice to see that some people actually read our little article and hopefully other small design and development firms can take something away from it, but the vast majority of comments seem to be from people that don’t even click over to read.

I suppose this is all due to use of social voting that was implemented into the site via Pligg, but that is only a small part of the site as a whole. What about the design, the blog, the implementation of code and project management? In reality, that was the point of article which apparently went unnoticed. I also wonder how much of a fuss would have been thrown if users had no idea it was pligg. I suspect there still would have been some groans, but nothing to the degree of some users we saw.

Yes, pligg has a ton of optimization issues, bugs, and fixes out of the box, but did any reader notice that the Simply Fired site never went down during the whole digg process? I suppose the few who took the time to read the article would notice that the MC team did quite a bit of work on the site (2 months actually) and used that time to build something stable. What people don’t seem to understand is Pligg is just a script, and a small one at that. It serves a purpose by allowing users to vote on “something” via ajax without leaving a page. Beyond that, it requires your work to make it manageable, stable, scalable and optimized.

In the end I suppose diggers will be diggers and can be threatened by anything that requires voting. Even if it’s a site like Fired which does not reside in the same theme or goal as digg. Remember people, digg was not the first voting site for news, nor was it not the first site to use ajax either. So instead of just freaking out over a voting method, how about some nice conversation about design, development, usability, and coding?