Cool quote:

“Now that everyone and their grandmother’s smoking buddies are trying to spam Digg, Reddit, and Netscape into oblivion, I think the opportunity to use that as a reliable factory of linkbuilding has jumped the shark“

And another…

“Back to the masses of chainsmoking grandmothers and why you should jump off that bandwagon immediately. If you are trying to linkbait now, good freaking luck. Depending on the community, Power Accounts have either been marginalized or it’s too late to build an effective toolbox of them. It’s time to stop buying into the hype of Linkbaiting Millions and accept the fact that you “bait� an audience the same way people have been audience building for centuries“

Source: Scoreboard Media Group.

On a related note, SEOMOZ notices a big decrease in Digg traffic to their site.

“Far be it from me to post information like this without checking on stats from others. According to my unnamed, but “on-Digg-all-the-time� sources from around the SEO world, Digg has also been sending them far less traffic than previous efforts.“

Gaming any system will, eventually, either kill it or make it stronger.

The problem the social media sites have is that they are built on the idea of being an open free-for-all. However, if they limit their openness, as a defensive strategy against people gaming their systems, then they invariably change into something else.

As we saw recently with Digg, the audience can be rather fickle when it comes to constraint of freedom. The audience can  make a mess, and then move on to somewhere else. Yet, if freedom is not restricted, then the system could die under the weight of “spam�. In Digg’s case, publication of sensitive data that may lead to legal problems, and marketing-driven link bait. Not saying all link bait is bad/spam - it isn’t - however it’s fair to say that Digg probably don’t want the front page permanently occupied by SEO companies.

It’s getting harder to link bait social media. It’s getting a lot harder to run a popular social network, too.

Is the low-hanging fruit of social media just about all gone?