Social Status: Digg's badwithcomputer talks shop

Digg user badwithcomputer. (Photo credit: Dashiell)

We have all heard from the pioneers of social media. Interviews with Kevin Rose on Digg, Biz Stone on Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook are a dime a dozen.

But you, online reader, were Time's person of the year in 2006. You are what keeps social media fresh and worth reading (well, some of the time).

As part of a new Web Scout series, we talk to you -- well, maybe not you, per se, but the users out there who spend hours per day contributing content and building an almost celebrity status on their platforms of choice.

First up is Digg user badwithcomputer, who has consistently been a top 10 submitter to the social news website for the past year since he opened his account.

On Digg, his "real name" is Henry Hill, which actually turns out to be a homage to the 1990s flick "Goodfellas." Outside the virtual world, the Los Angeles resident is Dashiell, a 21-year-old student at Pitzer College, a liberal arts school in Claremont.

Badwithcomputer's beginnings on Digg were much like that of anyone just getting into the site. He would submit stories he thought were interesting and nobody seemed to agree with him. His submissions would get only a couple of votes, or Diggs, and then fall off the map. Dashiell chronicles his humble beginnings in our instant-message conversation.

badwithcomputer: One day I got lucky with some video I found on Break and was instantly hooked on the inexplicable nerdy joy of seeing something I submitted become popular. I haven't looked back.

LA Times: I know what you mean.

BWC: Yeah, and that's the problem. Most users just throw their hands up and leave a million comments about how broke the system is without taking a look at their activity on the site. Consistently submit quality content that is of interest to a wide range of people and things will eventually start rolling.

Or not, and that's the often irritable problem with Digg for a lot of people. But what can you do?

You could try talking to other Diggers. Dashiell keeps in contact with top users, like Zaibatsu, the third all-time submitter, and head honcho MrBabyMan. And their chats take place through more traditional means, not using Digg's "shout" feature, an internal system for communicating and sharing stories of which Dashiell is not a fan.

BWC: I haven't talked to MrBabyMan in a while but we have each other's screen names. Every now and then i get the pleasure of a brief phone chat with Zaibatsu where we talk shop and do a cursory catchup. MakiMaki is an android from the future and I'm worried that if I talk to him he'll drain all my Digg power, like Shang Tsung style.

MakiMaki, by the way ... never sent a single shout and he is hitting the front page more than anyone else these days. Shows you how much you can rely on the shout system if you think you can register over night and just start shouting to a thousand friends.

In addition to those, Dashiell says he respects Digg users jaybol and Brian Cuban, brother of billionaire entrepreneur Mark.

Unlike many of Digg's top users, Dashiell doesn't have a slew of RSS feeds he is subscribed to. He searches for Diggable content the same way the Internet's earliest adopters found links to post on Usenet message boards: by surfing his favorite websites, which include Kotaku, Gawker, Break and Funny or Die. E-mail solicitations probably aren't the best idea for "helping" him find your content.

BWC: Sometimes I get IM's or emails from sites basically just wondering how they can get something on the front page. Every now and then i'll get a real suspect email that is just straight up offering money in exchange for a front page submission and I just forward those to abuse@digg.com.

It just comes with the territory of being on the top 50 digg users list.

Badwithcomputer is notorious for his funny, edgy, eye-grabbing headlines. We asked him to pick out some of his all-time favorites, but of all the ones he mentioned, THIS IS HOW I MAKE BREAD is the only story suitable for publication due to its lack of obscenity.

BWC: That was a great submission just because you rarely see something with all caps get popular, but it totally fit in this case.

As trends and the site's community rapidly change, Dashiell seems to be ahead of the curve. His number of front-page hits -- nearly three every day for the last 30 days -- aren't slowing down, and he will likely be a major player on the site for a very long time.

"I got 99 problems but a Digg ain't one," he wrote.

-- Mark Milian

Comments

[Joshy Wilder]

LOL, Now he sounds like one funny dude! Good interview!

JW

[kaleesh]

Yes J.W.,, a regular G.O.B :D

[Fazle]

no OT No care

[VEl]

I'm still trying to figure out what spending loads of time scouring the net just for things to upload to Digg gets you in life.

Let's say 5 years from now, you look back and on average you've spent literal months of your added time doing nothing but finding and submitting articles to Digg. You developed a "fan base". You're a top 50 Digg.com submission powerhouse... Ok, now what though?

Does this add up to anything productive? Does it translate over into money somehow? Is it just "Hey I'm famous...On Digg...That's right I take stories other people write and I let other people know about em..For FREE! isn't that awesome?"

Maybe I'm missing something but unless there's something beneficial to be gained by being a "pro" Digg submitter, I can think of many other ways to spend my free daily time that would turn over into something useful either monetary or otherwise.

[FierceGoldenI]

To Fazle, Yes it can amount to money as he mentioned getting bribes for first page diggs if you had read the article thoroughly; on the other hand badwithcomputer is a respectable digg'r, I suppose.

[Emily]

Hi VEI,

It makes him happy. Sometimes we do things because we like doing them.

[Chris Lang]

This is a really insightful post looking into one of my favorite Digg users. Thank you for bringing BadWithComputer out from behind his moniker. See you on Digg, BWC.