Can You Digg It?

Wow. Things certainly are jumping in social town, looks like some digg users are jumping ship, some people are happy, some sad, what’s going on you ask? Looks to me like people are getting fed up with the way digg works.

For those that don’t know, Digg is a sort of news site, where users sign up and post links to news, blogs, whatever they run across on the internet, and other users can vote and comment on the articles. If a story is dugg by enough users, it will make it to front page and can receive lots of traffic, enough traffic that it takes some sites down, because they can’t handle the load, much like the Slashdot effect of being listed on slashdot.com. The whole idea is to get people involved, reading and commenting on stories, like a big community around the water cooler, where it goes wrong is the whole friends thing. People add each other as friends and digg each others stories, so a small group can control lots of the content by submitting stories and voting on them, which in turn gets them quickly to the front page where they are seen by large numbers of users who also vote on their favorites. This is what is being complained about in these posts, Digg the rigged? A closer look at Digg’s democratic model,

What does this say about Digg? It means a small ‘aristocracy’ controls the vast majority of the content that gets on Digg, and it means that every day it gets harder and harder for new users to have any kind of an impact. I think Digg made a fatal flaw by adding their friend system because it turned Digg into more of a popularity contest than it did into who has the most quality content. But, it also shows Digg is a true democracy. And like a true democracy, the crowds making the decisions tend to not make the best choices en-masse, and it follows the saying, ‘the richer get richer and the poorer get poorer’.

An article forevergeek, Digg Corrupted: Editor’s Playground, not User-Driven Website,

Digg as an idea is fantastic. As a system of disseminating news without having to wait for editors it is amazing. But it seems to be suffering from a power complex. The two articles we originally mentioned were obviously promoted to the front page in an artificial manager.. Our website getting banned was obviously in retaliation to our story. Their entire philosophy now feels shallow and false - the editors decidedly put those two articles to the front page, just like they decidedly removed us from their system. Users may have originally driven the website, but it looks like that ideal is nothing more than a nice idea in the past.

One from Slashdot, Growing Censorship Concerns at Digg, which itself has had similar trouble and accusations,

I find site rivalries boring, but growing concerns over Digg “censorship” have been submitted steadily for the last few months. Today two such stories were submitted so numerous that I had little choice but to post. The first claims that Digg is the editor’s playground- it explains how a few users control Digg, and that it’s not really the ‘Democracy’ that they claim it to be. Personally I think this is all totally within the rights of their editors to choose content however they like. But it’s less pleasant when combined with accounts getting banned for posting content critical of digg, and watching other content getting removed for being critical of sponsors (also, here is Kevin Rose’s reply).

Many digg posts on the subject, including this one, Digg Censors Stories That Offend Sponsors

This is purely that the users have reported the story as inaccurate or lame, not censorship by the Digg management. I think the real problem here on Digg is that a core of users have banded together to promote their own “party line”, so to speak. I’ve noticed that the same people seem to vote for each others posts time and time again, and almost in the same order. Very strange. It’s like a Digg Mafia underlying the community. I’m waiting for the horses head to appear next to me in bed just for saying this in public!

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch adds, Troubles in Diggville,

To some this is troubling because it removes the supposedly democratic nature of Digg. Unlike newspapers like the New York Times, where a small group of editors decide what is “news” and therefore included in the paper, Digg is a more meritocritous and democratic process where the readers actually decide what is newsworthy. If Digg is being corrupted by a relatively small group of users, the difference between Digg and the NYT becomes less clear.

Others respond that these groups are just very hard core Digg users that spend much of their day scouring the web for good stories to promote on Digg. Digg ranks users based on how successful their submitted stories become, and a handful of users are hyper-competitive about their Digg ranking. The argument is that these users are simply more proficient at finding stories.

Kevin Rose responds to all of this with this digg post, Gaming Digg / New Changes from this site Digg Friends,

That said, today we read a couple blog posts that highlight users digging each others stories. This is something we encourage through our friends features and will continue to expand as digg evolves. It is our goal to create a platform in which you can share and promote news that is important to you. What is changing however is how we are handling story promotion. While we don’t disclose exactly how story promotion works (to prevent gaming the system), I can say that a key update is coming soon. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.

I’m sure this will probably help the system a little bit, but they probably need to rethink the whole friend thing, as well as posting the most popular users list. Some people will do whatever it takes to become number one, on any system. The same problem exists at Netscape.com, friends digging friends stories, heck, if I didn’t recruit some and vote for their stories, some of my stories would never get any attention, since lots of users, I’m assuming, mainly visit the front page and friends profiles to vote for stories.

What is really interesting about this article, is it caused the #1 digg user, p9s50W5k4GUD2c6, to say he is quitting,

I ignored Digg’s ice-cold level of support during the Netscape transition. Instead I stayed with Digg - for nothing.
I ignored Jay’s jack-ass condescending T-Shirt comment.
I ignored the misbegotten algorithm you all put in place shortly after that that made it MISERABLY hard for any user to get to the front page (which is a big factor in this whole issue)
I overlooked all the red ink about I/we were FOOLS to digg so hard for you - the 60 Million Dollar Man.
I overlooked the Trademark fiasco and the treatment of Digg’s users
I overlooked this: http://digg.com/music/EMI_in_free_music_downloads_deal and
But I will NOT overlook your tacit equation of BUSTING MY ASS for Digg with gaming.

As a direct result of your blog this evening. I will no longer no supporting Digg going forward. I bequeath my measly number one position to whoever wants to reign.

I don’t know about busting his ass, I mean, come on, all it requires is getting a feed reader, listing all of the big news sites feeds so you can watch them, and monitoring of news sites like techmeme, memorandum and others, and submitting and digging or voting stories like crazy. I have been involved in the Netscape community lately and it pretty much works the same way, except for the fact that the pin stories at the top of the page, probably the only reason for my only front page story, which would have eventually been popular because of the subject, but it would’ve been someone else submitting and getting their friends to vote for it. That story has almost 1000 comments, so you know it would’ve been popular no matter who submitted it. As for other posts, it is hard to get stories listed because so many are submitting so many stories, if the story is older than 10 or 15 minutes, you are probably out of luck.

Another interesting post at digg, Top Digg Users Remove Avatars in Protest and Support of p9,

Why don’t they protest in a different, more effective way- say- never post again?

We’d all be better off without each one of them spamming us with 50 articles a day that we’d get anyways. The only difference would be that the really deserving ones would make it to the front page instead of all their crap.

Lot of people are aggravated with the top users, is it jealousy, or is it they can’t work the system in the same way, or just because they feel left out, since they can’t get people to vote for their stories? Probably all of the above, I’m sure people want to see digg fail, and people want to see it get bigger and better. You have to take everything with a grain of salt, as you don’t really know what their motivations are.

Jason Calacanis weighs in, digg top users protest (or, “one user, one vote–that’s the rule),for those who don’t know, he runs Netscape, a digg “clone” that has hired some of the top diggers away,

It is so clear that the top 1% of social bookmarkers are so talented that they should do it for a living. That’s why we started our Netscape Navigators program which pays top social bookmarkers. Right now it’s just a part-time job for folks, but in another year or two I bet we have people doing this full-time all over the place. We watched this happen in blogging from 2003 to 2006.

It’s not really that difficult of a job, you just needs lots of friends and the time to submit and vote on lots of stories, I was a top Netscape user, according to their front page, in less than a day, and that was just one homepage story out of about 10 or so. But, I think we will see some full timers, users like Neophile, who actually contribute and make it easier, stand out in my mind. Check this article out, where he actually created a “tool” to help submit articles from feeds to Netscape. Jason did also take a second to invite the top digg user to contact him about finding a spot for him at Netscape. Always a self promoter that Jason.

So, what is the solution, and can there really be a good solution? When you get groups of people doing stuff, it can always get out of hand, as it appears to have at digg. digg is the first big site of it’s kind, I’m sure with the big number of users that they are working hard to make it better, or at least make it better until he can sell it, hehe. I think they need to adjust the whole friends idea, maybe not let you see who submitted it until you digg it, or make it impossible to vote for users posts from their profile, make them actually find the stories, if they aren’t emailing or instant messaging them to each other already. They should also rethink the whole top contributor thing, take the whole competition factor out of it by keeping it internal, that way, only the admins know who the top users are, and maybe point them out in some other way. Lets hope the changes that digg is making is a good start.

Here is a Photo of a digg user digging stories at about one every 1.5 seconds, think he is reading everyone, or just voting friends stories?

Posted by Jimmy Daniels September 2006

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