Bum Rush the Page? Is A Self Promotion Revolt the Way to Take Back Digg and Reddit?

Or should we be moving our content to social news verticals that appreciate us?

Or… here’s a revolutionary idea – how about doing both!

These are the kinds of things I started thinking of when I read Daniel Miessler‘s post “Digg and Reddit: It’s Not Wrong to Create and Submit Your Own Content. In Fact, it’s Necessary.”

Of course, his post was more about this….

I wrote recently about learning to differentiate between blogspam and self-submitted content on meritocracy-based sites like Digg and Reddit. My goal was to try and reverse the negative programming we all have towards reading self-submitted material. I attempted to do this by showing how it differs from spamming — which is taking someone else’s writing and submitting it from your site to try and steal ad traffic.

But even more important than asking readers to appreciate self-submitted content is the call for people to write and submit their own. Nothing limits the quality of what we read more than the idea that it’s socially unacceptable to self-submit.

… than some kind of organized revolution, which is the wild conclusion I came to on my own.

But, first, I say, first, join me in buying this guy a case of Heinekin (Yes, I am a beer snob. Deal with it.)

Secondly, Power to the People!!

We could all team up, and organize a week of submitting our own very best content, one out of every seven posts, let’s say, for a week, and make a show at Reddit and Digg.

We can tag them with a secret password of some kind, and support each other IF and only IF we feel the content warrants it by voting. IE- Not a free pay per digg like some sites, which I am purposely not linking to – don’t you dare do it either.

Why should this guy be downvoted for self promotion, as long as he did a good job with the article he sends in, and it’s not against terms of service? Self-promotion isn’t inherently bad, man! Digg has a one-hour show (that I love) in which they do nothing but… promote Digg!

Is there a social networking site alive today that didn’t get a boost from…. um… I dunno … the bloggers who are the same people who get salty-hidden-ice-toast-ed on for submitting their own links in a fair and equitable fashion?

If ten people sign the petition (that means comment on this blog post) by Sunday at noon, I pledge to start and organize this movement myself. My only stipulation is that a- the undersigned participate (you *can* comment anonymously) and 2- we also submit our pages to sites that support our desire to self promote.

If we’re not allowed to promote our own links, state as much in your terms and we’ll stay away. But if you say that we can, then we shouldn’t have our stories buried because we want to protect our work by being the first one to get credited for it — even if we’re the ONLY ones.

You guys want to be in a traffic test? Then dammit, let’s do one.

REVOLUTION!!!

To revolutionize make a change nothin’s strange
People, people we are the same
No we’re not the same
Cause we don’t know the game
What we need is awareness, we can’t get careless
You say what is this?
My beloved, lets get down to business
Mental self defensive fitness
(Yo) bum rush the show
You gotta go for what you know
Make everybody see, in order to fight the powers that be
(faint voice in background) Lemme hear you say…
Fight the Power

From Fight the Power by Public Enemy

P.S. The first person to tell me what page of Bum Rush the Page my poetry appears on gets an autographed copy from me, shipped Tuesday 2-day (unless international, then whatever express they got for out your way).