Last night Digg announced that the algorithm that determines which stories get posted to the front page. It seems that the change is to penalize group voting - when a group of Digg friends all vote on the same story. Stories need to reach a certain point of “diversity” before being promoted to the front page. Mashable thinks that “Digg is a victim of its own success.”

“The illusion is that Digg is a system typically referred to as ‘direct democracy.’ As such, denizens of that democratic environment want a system they can count on to put across their agenda, especially the long time users of Digg. They’ve formed the online equivalent of coalition governments with their sizable friends list, so when they post something to the site, they can reasonably expect it to make front page if it is of a certain quality.” - Mashable


The Digg community is angry. Top Digg users have even gone so far as to have an open letter the Digg management published on Valleywag. Their beefs include:

  • Lack of communication and disregard for the Digg community
  • Unexplained and unacknowledged banning of top users
  • Lack of transparency - Digg only shows you the stories that people have dugg, but not the ones that are buried
  • For months, dozens of sites have been on an auto-bury list, often with no explanation whatsoever.
  • Repeated and flagrant disrespect of its top users

The “Top Digg Users” claim that Digg has “become too powerful a media force and its lack of transparency and faith in the community is reason for concern.” Wow, that sounds an awful lot like how a democracy really acts - not how it’s designed.

The reality is this: Digg is a corporation and there are certain steps that it needs to take to protect itself. Sometimes content needs to be “censored.” Sometimes the rules need to be changed so that blatant abuse of the system doesn’t become widespread. You will never see a long-standing and successful, transparent, and fully democratic web site, just like you will never see a successful, transparent, and fully democratic government. Look at SecondLife, a place where the owner was going to take no government-type actions, has started regulating “banks” in the virtual world. These “communities” are businesses and they are going to look out for themselves first. Hopefully, what’s good for the business is good for the customer, but that doesn’t always happen. Get over yourselves “Top Digg Users” and wielding your power is what has brought Digg to this point.

Technorati Tags: ,