Over the weekend, 10Questions got Dugg, big-time. Here’s what happened: it looks like the site became a focal point for the same thing that New York Times Magazine columnist Virginia Heffernan noticed about the top-discussed video on YouTube: the roiling argument over religion’s influence on society.
Friday, we got the first signs of something developing when NoGodBlog.com, which describes itself as a “free service for atheists” put up a posting suggesting a quiet battle over the video question “Is America Unofficially a Theocracy?” The blogger wrote, “We used to be in 7th place, but thanks to a church group trying to vote down the video, (an email confirmed this) we have been stuck in 13th place for quite some time.”
Other bloggers with similar views picked up on the controversy, including Atheist News, Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes, and God is for Suckers.There was also discussion on community forums for sites like Richard Dawkins.net, Atheist Network Forum, Agnostic Forums and Rational Responders.com. But traffic on the site was relatively low Friday and Saturday, however, with just about 1600 unique visits.
Enter Digg, the giant social news sharing site. Sometime late Saturday, a Digg user with the inartful handle of “fcukbush” posted a link to the Atheist News post with the following plea: “PLEASE DIGG! Help this atheist guy get two very important questions put to the presidential candidates about the role of religion in politics. Only 10 hours left!”
In just about eight hours, that item became “popular” on Digg, which means it was vaulted onto the main News page, where it still stands as of this morning. It It probably didn’t hurt that the writer mistakenly thought that 10Questions voting was ending in 10 hours (actually ten days: November 14), but clearly there’s been a huge impact.
We had nearly 7,000 unique visits on Sunday, 90% from newcomers, and the bounce rate was very low, just around 15-20%. Which means people were coming to the site and participating. Indeed, since Friday we’ve had about 18,000 new votes on questions cast, with about 5,000 new participants joining in, bringing us to a current total of more than 73,000 votes from more than 22,000 participants as of Monday morning. And both of those questions about religion from “Lunch4lyfe” have rocketed into the top ten, currently in the #2 and #3 positions.
I don’t think anyone can describe what is happening here as “astroturfing,” as the range of feeder sites and forums contributing to this phenomenon, as well as the evidence that there have been activists on both sides of each question trying to rally their friends to vote it up or down, suggests something very clear cut: this is a rough-and-tumble open platform for online democracy—and right now a lot of people think it would be a good thing to hear the presidential candidates address questions like: is America an unofficial theocracy, and how would you appeal to non-religious voters. Interestingly enough, these aren’t questions the candidates usually get asked.
Other linkage of note:
Latinopundit, a 10Questions co-sponsor, chimes in on the religion debate, saying it’s “One of the most interesting and pressing questions – IMHO – on 10Questions.com.”
The good folks at Crooks and Liars, another 10qs co-sponsor, included yet another plug for the site in an Open Thread. We love Crooks and Liars!
And the word about 10Questions is steadily spreading overseas, with more Italian bloggers (http://blogfestivalscienza.net/2007/11/04/donne-e-politica2/ and http://www.aghenorblog.com/2007/11/05/cosa-mi-sono-perso/) and Spanish bloggers http://sicrono.com/2007/11/04/10-questions-preguntas-a-los-candidatos/ and http://www.gutierrez-rubi.es/?p=330 starting to chime in.