jp's domain

coding like crazy

'Democratic'? 'User-driven'? These do not describe Digg

Earlier today I submitted an article to Digg about a flaw I have found in their submission model. There is further info at the actual article itself, but essentially, a small group of Digg's top users are always among the first few people to 'digg' each others' stories. If you look at the submissions by each person in this small group of people, you will all find them voting on each other and vice versa. It essentially means that every article submitted by these guys gets an automatic 10-15 diggs. It also means that this level of control by these top users will only increase and get worse as they have undue exposure in the system that other users simply don't have. But that isn't the point of this article, that was the point of the last one, and I invite you to take a look at it yourself if interested.

The point of this article isn't a flaw in a system itself, but a flaw in how the system is run. In less than 2 hours after submitting my story to Digg, there has been great interest and over 120 diggs by interesed diggers. Most stories get on the frontpage with far less. Infact, the top 3 current stories on the frontpage have less diggs than my story. But my story isn't and won't be on the frontpage. Why is that?

It turns out that at some point after submission, the story was no longer showing up in the 'upcoming queue'. You can no longer search for it either. And if you take a look at my profile, the story actually is flagged as a 'homepage' story, meaning it should be on the frontpage. But it isn't. And unlike stories which are 'buried' by Digg users, this story doesn't have any indicator mentioning that 'diggers have found this to be innaccurate'. What this means without a doubt is that a moderator at Digg has manually removed the story from the frontpage.

What is the significance of this? It would seem that despite Digg's emphasis on being 'democratic', truly only a very small group of users get to actually have any kind of a say in the site. If you aren't a part of this group, then good luck. Even if you submit an article about a certain subject first, if one of these users in question comes along and submits it also, your story will never see the light of day. Further, it means that Digg's moderators have no problem with this abuse of the system. They seem to actually be restricting access to anything that may be critical of Digg's flaws (even if this is constructive).

It turns out for as much hyping as Digg does about how it is 'user-driven' and 'democratic', more than anything, if Digg's moderators don't want something to be seen, you won't see it. It IS controlled by editors, make no mistake. And as these editors repress Digg's flaws instead of fixing them, Digg will only continue to become a less and less valuable source of information.

We must remember that it was only a year ago that Kevin Rose and his gang were bright-eyed about how open Digg's model was and how it revolutionized the Internet. He and many users of Digg were critical of Slashdot's editorially-closed model, and of the status quo there. Why has Kevin Rose's tone all of a sudden changed? Why are certain users allowed to take advantage of the system and why do moderators have a final say on the commmunity? This is NO different than Slashdot's model, with the exception that at Slashdot, it is a rotating cycle as to what users get to decide what content is of quality, not a single set of users that always decide what gets on the frontpage. You might say that at this point in time, Digg is even worse than Slashdot when it comes to user participation. Where has Kevin Rose's bright-eyed dream gone? Well, a lot changes when your website is suddenly worth millions. Maybe you can't blame him, but you can blame Digg for continuing to harp on talking points that simply don't ring true for it.

Will Digg change? The people who regularly use Digg can only hope so. Perhaps these articles will start some kind of movement back to what Digg originally was supposed to be.

last updated 3 years ago #