Stop Global Laming

I read a post this morning on the #dontgo Movement’s website which asked “When will the right start collaborating?” One specific point which got my attention was this:

Love or hate Digg, you have to admit that liberal eActivists have been able to pass around enormous web influence using Digg.com. If you’ve been on the front page of Digg, and I have, you know that a link there is worth at least 15,000 unique visits within a few hours.

And while Digg.com isn’t necessarily “liberal owned”, the left has dominated the Digg community and the right has done very little as a collaborative effort to respond. When will we realize that we too can be VERY competitive in this realm?

We actually DO have a site on our own site that uses the Digg philosophy of crowd powered news over at R-igg.com. R-igg was developed by a brilliant young mind of the right in Aaron Marks. But there has been no collaborative movement to help it reach critical mass. Why not? How hard can it be for 500 center-right eActivists to collaborate and help this Beta site rise in predominance?

There is something wrong with this line of thinking; what is it?

The problem is that developing a center-right social media destination does little to influence public opinion. All it does is create an echo chamber where other right-wingers can see a reflection of their own opinions, and while this may be comforting, it is ultimately unproductive in terms of advancing conservative philosophies and candidates. Digg is powerful because it’s perceived as “mainstream” and because it’s treated credibly by other mainstream media outlets.

Did conservatives learn nothing from How Obama Got Elected? There’s a sizable portion of the electorate that doesn’t vote down a party line, but rather they’re influenced by what they learn through the mainstream media. Developing a parallel alternative to the mainstream media accomplishes nothing if we fail to influence the mainstream media.

Rush Limbaugh is a good example. He isn’t effective because he’s simply an alternative voice to the mainstream media; he’s effective because his audience is so large that the media has to account for him. Rush is able to convert liberals to conservatives because he’s able to get mentioned in liberal thought mediums frequently. Every verbal molehill uttered by Rush that the MSM tries to turn into a mountain is another instance where some liberal inevitably tunes into him to “learn thy enemy” and begins to understand the correctness of conservatism.

Digg already has a massive audience and the website itself is declaratively politically neutral; the mainstream media thus takes Digg seriously for the same reason that it has to take Rush seriously: size of audience. Yeah, in theory we could build a conservative Digg that would one day be large enough to influence the media, but it took years for Digg to become as powerful as it is now. Instead of building another echo chamber where conservatives share ideas with each other, why not go to Digg instead and fight the liberal userbase for frontpage real-estate? Not only will it be easier to assert some control over Digg, assuming that conservatives have the balls to go there, but it will be cheaper and more successful than building an alternative echo chamber.

Digg does not have a declarative bias; it doesn’t identify itself as “all the best liberal news.” Digg isn’t like the rest of the mainstream media – IT’S USER-CONTRIBUTED CONTENT. Right now, most of the users are heavily liberal. Don’t you get it? Conservatives have just as much of a shot at getting an article on the front page of Digg if we get off of our duffs, sign up, promote our articles, and bury the ever-loving-shit out of every DailyKos, Democratic Underground, ThinkProgress, Raw Story, and Media Matters article.

Digg is fair game – everyone gets a vote on every story, and we have been terrible at taking advantage of that. Rather than just surrender, yes that’s the correct word, the largest, most credible social media outlet to the liberals, why not fight them for it! If we’re going to fight the American electorate’s ignorance, we aren’t going to do it by talking to ourselves. We need to drill our ideas so loudly that the mainstream media can’t ignore it, and Digg is the perfect place to accomplish that.

Do yourself a favor:

• Sign up for Digg.
• Friend me.
• Shout articles that you want buried or Dugg to me, and I will do the same. Repeat this exercise for everybody else.

You want a chance to fight the MSM? This is the easiest way you can do it.