Digg Sex Change Experiment or Bart Simpson Rules

I almost always use my real photo for the profiles on of all these social networking websites, and I have no problem making friends and grow my network. But Digg has always been special to me. My Digg profile used to say "30 years old female" from NYC and my avatar displayed my smiling face. Being a Digg user since February 2006 I only made one friend. That's right, only one mutual friend. I've been trying adding people as friends but they never returned a favor. What I was doing wrong? I really tried to be a nice community player: dug stories, left comments and kept adding friends. OK, I admit submitting a couple boring press releases due to job related duties and maybe a couple of nothing special articles just to get nice rankings in Google for the selected keywords phrase stuffed in the title. Nobody's perfect. But without friends I felt ignored and bored. Nobody voted for my stories, I felt like complete Digg failure.

According to QuantCast the typical Digg user is a 18-35 years old male who also loves to visit collegehumor.com When you set up a profile on Digg you have several options to identify yourself: guy, girl, dude, lady, fellow, bird, chap, grrrl, gentleman, damsel, male, female, transgender, none of the above... While setting the profile I selected "female" from this impressive list along with my avatar that clearly supported my choice.
About a week ago I decided to perform the sex change operation on myself and went from "female" to 'dude" in 10 seconds or less. Also cool looking Bart Simpson was my new face. The result? 10 new mutual friends and my stories finally started getting some votes.

What's next? I guess I would have to submit some cool gadget related news to be finally accepted in male dominated Digg community. I am not complaining, don't get me wrong! I guess the lesson here is When in Rome Do As The Romans Do.

Happy Digging everyone!