The incredibly successful news site Digg has hit a few speed bumps recently. Digg is a news site that promotes news stories, submitted by users, to its home page based on votes by other Digg users. If a story is “dugg” by enough users, it goes to the home page and a lot of traffic is directed to the link in the news story.
In addition to the recent targeting of Digg’s business by AOL when they turned the massive netscape.com property into a digg clone, a number of people have recently complained, loudly, about the ability for groups of users on Digg to get a story to the home page, or removed from the home page, by acting as a group.
Political blogger Michelle Malkin was one of the first to complain that groups of conservative or liberal Digg users were acting to remove posts from pundits on the other side. More recently, another blogger analyzed Digg home page stories and concluded that a small group of powerful Digg users, acting together, control a large percentage of total home page stories.
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.
Today Digg co-founder Kevin Rose responded to these complaints. He takes both sides of the argument. Kevin says that groups of people recommending stories to each other is actually a good thing. But he also says that Digg will soon be implementing a new algorithm that weighs a diversified group of Diggers more heavily than groups acting together:
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 think this is the right thing to do. Digg needs to continue to encourage people to recommend stories to their friends, but also find ways to get truly unique and interesting stories to the home page without the sponsorship of a Digg user group. Hopefully the algorithm changes will help. Another suggestion to improve things that I recently passed on to Digg CEO Jay Adelson: weigh a story digg more if it comes from perusing the “upcoming stories” area v. someone hitting the story via a direct link. Since friends often email or IM stories around via the direct link, it’s more likely to be a vote from a group. A digg from the upcoming stories page is much more likely to simply be a user reviewing stories and picking the ones that he or she thinks are important.
Update: Digg’s top user has supposedly “resigned” in anger over Kevin’s remarks…
Is there a monetary benefit that drives these groups?
hmm… yes, so what, that is what digg is about, you cant really stop a large group of people, as with everything…
“speed bumbs” gives me a strange mental image.
“Kevini says” …. is that meant to be diminutive?
If so then on behalf of all Kevin’s everywhere I officially complain.
Digg’s top user just announced he’s fed up and leaving:
http://neothoughts.com/2006/09.....s-goodbye/
Regarding the democratic nature of Digg…
Why do they refuse to disclose the “promotion” algorithm? If knowing how it works is a sure way to defeat it, the problem is in the algorithm, not in how people use it. Isn’t that anything but democratic?
That may not make sense to some but now imagine that when you vote for president you just don’t have a clue how your vote counts. Would you call that “democratic”? There are some excellent open source digg-like systems out there and they don’t have a problem disclosing how their algorithms work. Sure they may not be perfect, but you know? They have the entire development community to help making it better.
The “we want to keep it secret” approach Digg is wrong, wrong, wrong. Make it Open Source. What are you afraid of?
RBA, do you believe that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft etc. should open up and disclose the algorithms they use to stop search spammers? Secrecy is required when there is no perfect algorithm.
The past several days and weeks have seen some interesting developments in the Web 2.0 space. Kiko folds. The Facebook backlash. Rojo sells for a paltry amount. Now problems at Digg. Is the bubble starting to deflate? Only time will tell, but I think the signs point to, at the very least, a growing recognition that Web 2.0 has its flaws and that the value and utility of some of these services has been overestimated.
It’s becoming readily apparent that users are really in control and they’re not as loyal to the popular Web 2.0 services as one might expect. The fact that Facebook, which is considered by many to have the most loyal following of any social network, has faced a backlash from hundreds of thousands of users and growing, many of whom are threatening to boycott the service or leave altogether, highlights the fact that these services, which are all free, are highly vulnerable to mishaps, changing tastes, etc.
The value in all these communities is created by the users and once these companies start doing things that users perceive to be against THEIR interests, users become a lot more vocal about the fact that they’re building all the value for these services. They seem to be very cognizant of the fact that they’re creating these paper millionaires and aren’t likely to continue supporting this creation of (paper) wealth if they don’t get what they want. And who can blame them? The hubris and arrogance displayed by Facebook management in its response to their mistakes has proven that money is now driving management, not the original principles that made them so successful in the first place.
I’ve always personally thought that Digg was overhyped and and this idea that it harnesses the “wisdom of crowds” for news is not valid. Anybody that has read James Surowiecki’s book knows that for a crowd to be wise, it has to be diverse. Digg is anything but diverse. A small group is responsible for most of the activity and its userbase is made up mostly of technology geeks. Because of the lack of diversity, I argue that by Surowiecki’s own criteria, Digg is a dumb crowd.
Perhaps it’s time to realize the following:
- These Web 2.0 services and technologies are commodities. People are invested in services like Digg and Facebook, but they’re not customers and there’s no real massive barrier stopping them from jumping ship.
- Digg, Facebook, etc. have some of the characteristics of brands, but they’re not Coca-Cola or Budweiser by any stretch of the imagination. At the end of the day, they’re tools for people to communicate and share. Maybe they should think of themselves as providers of tools as opposed to $200 million or $2 billion companies.
- Web 2.0 bloggers, VCs and the like are not the people who matter in Web 2.0. It’s the users. It amazes me to see writers at TechCrunch and GigaOm defend Facebook and claim that the new features show that Facebook “gets it” even after the massive backlash. It’s quite simple. If a sizable chunk of your userbase revolts and says they don’t like it, you don’t get it. Who should Facebook listen to - the people that use it everyday or bloggers? At the very least, they should have managed the roll out of these features in a better manner (e.g. poll users first, announce it’s coming, get feedback, manage expectations, provide an opt-out mechanism, etc.). There are some very experienced business people (like Michael) that for whatever reason refuse to admit that Facebook management failed to execute in a professional, intelligent manner.
Here are some more ideas:
1) The promotion algorithm should include the #of views that story has had in it’s algorithm. (if it doesn’t already)
2) There shouldn’t be any user rankings on the site. Providing such a list is of no long term benefit to the site.
I’ve written more thoughts on flaws with digg on my website:
http://tm.powersite.co.nz/arti.....with_digg/
Do all you web 2.0 guys really think that internet startups are the future of news? Of course newspapers have always relied on advertisement but - come on - journalism is a tool of democracy. How do you combine that with the laws of the free market or competition, showing what the reader wants to see.
May I remind you that the Iraq war was launched without it being debated even once on TV? All this because networks knew the audience would not follow.
Ever heard about public service? Oooops sorry for the bad word.
The bubble is not only a ficancial one. It’s also in the minds. Wake up guys, there is a world out here. Paper newspapers die because people think they can get informed by a startup or a free newspaper exclusively financed by advertisement.
See ya
It’s not democratic, it’s an echo chamber. I just don’t get these news sites. They’re like “news cllubs” where everyone is competing to be the most popular. How does that make for better news? It’s like taking the cast of a reality show and having them determine what you read. It’s merely entertainment …
I never got the auto-friend vote thing, seemed a horribly flawed idea to let people amass a voting block in that way. One person one vote, if you will. As it turns out, they’ve gone from the ideal of the democracy to exactly like what real democracies become.
Next we’re gonna be hearing about how people want paper trails at Digg.
A small group of people controls the content. Sounds familiar to me. I can see why some might get their panties in a ruffle over the alleged fact but it’s par for the course from where I stand. Then again, I’m not terribly invested in Digg.
Maybe someone can answer this for me, sarcasm and cynicism are fine though I’m not looking for a chuckle. Why does Digg have an “Overall Ranking” statistic and a “Promoted Stories Ratio,” among others? They seem like ego balm and have nothing to do with the stories. As far as I’m concerned I couldn’t care if an interesting story was Dugg by a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a New York Times once a month. I enjoy Digg because it gives me news I might otherwise miss. As far as who Dugg the news I could care less. The social aspects are nice and they’d survive without the stats.
Voting blocks, the digg algorithm dance are a tip of the iceberg, in my opinion.
Controversy had dogged digg for a while, since peope hae started investing their own time and energy into being diggers, and particularly when Kevin Rose hit the frontpage of Businessweek.
The most ‘controversial’ thing, I find, is that Digg bills itself as driven by users and moderated by users.
Clearly this isn’t the case.
Ask Aliwood if you like — this was the case of the Cadet who accidentally ‘gamed’ digg, and her less-than-newsworthy posts found themselves getting thousands of diggs and promoted right to the front page.
Hope Mr. Arrington won’t mind:
http://www.deepjiveinterests.c.....reference/
Nevertheless, Ms Wood, her profile and her posts were promptly obliterated. Spam? Maybe … but that’s up to the community to decide with its “bury” or “lame” function.
A small history of Digg Controversy:
http://www.deepjiveinterests.c.....ntroversy/
Cheers
Tony @ dji
Very interesting….I never “dugg” digg, finding it fairly one dimensional. Now I know why.
I think the change to these algorithms is all part of the “tuning” of social network services. This willl be very imporatant for social network based services to maintain credibility as they move out of a (largely) collaborative early adopter phase to the mass market.
I am fairly cynical about the “wisdom of crowds” as in most “democratic” systems a small, vociferous minority eventually gains power. The interesting question is how to make this sort of bloc voting transparent to all the other users, so they can take account of it.
I suspect in digg’s case that quite a bit of the problem is in the measurement and reward systems of the contributors, seems to me that there needs to be a balance between activity and impact, ie some form of damping of the impact of highly active members.
This is why I gave up on digg a while ago. Try reddit instead - the articles there are refreshingly well-rounded and diverse.
well I am leaning towards reddit nowadays. I see too many apple fanboy stories who digg anything related to apple (many of them trivial).
I have observed that stories related to MS/AOL/Sony/Dell especially bad ones gets dugg ( i am ok with that) however when something related to apple (sometimes google) then bury the story as inaccurate. For example the battery issue which plagued both dell/apple.
I am interested in knowing about apple/google… however I dont want to get biased news/articles
If all I find is biased news… I will look else where.. Hope Kevin you are reading this..
This is no different from what’s happening on a daily basis over at Wikipedia. User groups regularly lobby the smaller pages, as long as you have the time, the people and a few sockpuppets accounts, the vast majority of pages if fair game.
The way to cut down on this sort of behaviour is 1) to get more people contributing, which will raise the level of resources required to influence the engine and 2) continue improving the fraud detection algorithms.
It’s my understanding Kevin’s team is working on both.
There are users who get quality stories to the homepage - just based on the merit of those stories - and are not in any way connected
http://digg.com/users/SearchEngines/homepage
The “ideal” democracy? One man one vote? PLEASE. The system can be gamed by a single bored user with multiple accounts. Multiple users with something to gain by using multiple accounts - such as volunteer political workers, or paid product advertisement users, give the system no chance at all at being one person, one vote.
This is why there are weighted algorithms and specialized search criteria at Google; and Digg’s just lucky that Google hasn’t patented that entire concept, too. These systems without specialized algorithms make the Cook County “graveyard” vote look like child’s play.
As for P9, he can go cry in his coffee, or Jolt, or whatever… and as for Arun, wake up: news is -always- biased. I recommend to your reading (that is, an actual -book-) _Deciding What’s News_ by Herbert J. Gans, which is a classic study of the overall problem.
Digg is democractic. Somewhere along the line this notion that democracy is a desirable form of governing anything cropped up, it is just not true.
A democracy has all the problems Digg has. In this case small but organized cabals can influence things beyond what their numbers would suggest.
The United States is a representative government, not a democracy. Democracies do not guarantee fairness, no system of government or administration does.
Another word for a democracy is a tyranny of the majority, often times a tyranny of a well organized vocal minority. That sound pretty much like Digg to me.
“Update: Digg’s top user has supposedly “resigned” in anger over Kevin’s remarks…”
What a crybaby … !!
How does a user (non employee) resign from something that he was never hired to do. Just goes to show that the overal age and IQ of users that reach the “top” user level are really just a bunch of children.
Actually, We first brought this up a few weeks ago on MarketingShift here.
Apparently we struck a nerve with them b/c the Digg PR firm contacted us and we had an interview with Kevin Rose and Jay (CEO) yesterday for about an hour and a half. We’ll be posting our interview with them regarding the situation on friday.
It was surprising to hear what they had to say to a lot of our questions.
Whatever! Derek (bloodjunkie and supposed #1 digger) left to be paid by Jason Calacanis and Netscape weeks ago and hasn’t even submitted stories lately. Sorry but that’s a lame bonus and a draw to his blog. Sorry Derek but it’s true!
As a rare conservative that is into the web 2.0 thing I find Digg useful…but absolutely spilling over with anti-conservative stuff. In fact most web 2.0 stuff is. I understand that it is a lot of the younger people and fringe folks that are developing these technologies and they are promoting the technologies to people like them but jeez…It gets tiring when every story on every site mocks things that I support, for the most part. Are there any good web 2.0 beer sites or sports sites that anyone can reccomend? Even in the comments of this story there are the typical anti-government folks. Oh well. Cheers.
Why is Kevin addressing the circle jerk issues and not the bigger issue of [secretly] censoring all the stories that have the slightest critique of digg? - this reminds me of another group that “can’t hear any bad news or criticism”.
The stories that caused Kevin to respond had hundreds (and one had over 1000) diggs and yet they never appeared on the front even though many, many stories that had very few diggs did appear there - the stories discussing the problem disappeared due to a secret editing process that Kevin refuses to acknowledge that it even exists.
What about it Kevin, bloggers and diggers, is it time for digg.com to come clean or do they get to continue to lie and say digg.com is controlled by the users? It is BS, at least don’t treat users like suckers.
“Digg needs to continue to encourage people to recommend stories to their friends”
Recommend stories. Yes. Auto-digging friend’s stories without even reading them? No.
To summarize,”I can’t rig the system anymore so I’m going home.”
A few months ago, all of the media coverage about Digg contrasted it with Slashdot, claiming Digg was revolutionary because it was democratic and non-editorial. This was certainly the spirit under which it was founded but recently for me, the distinction has been less obvious. 100 Digg users submit 56% of stories. By inspection, I see that these stories mostly come from major media outlets (NYTimes, CNet, etc.) — These 100 Diggers have effectuvely acted as Digg’s editing staff.
I think this is a good move for Digg and will hopefully encourage more diversity in the nature of stories and posters on the site. Viva la revolucion!
digg is a quick daily fix for retards. Much ado about nothing.
Digg, to me, is another company like Google, which has developed a huge following mostly from free publicity. But Digg is a much lower echelon site than Google, and that isn’t changing fast.
The “Digg Effect” is way overstated.
I think Digg will always be the forfront of aggregation space. The group dynamics of Digg is clearly shown on these sites like TechCrunch, Gigaom - they all seem to publish the same news with a few exceptions.
Perhaps TechCrunch one day would come out with a ‘group blogging” platform - like WebWorkerDaily??
Digg is down for a very…Very, good reason ^^. I got word 2 or 3 of the top 5 users left this morning due to the comments on the blog by Kevin Rose! Hah. They contributed more than 3,500+ articles all together. No wonder the sites mysteriously down lol.
Even Kevin Rose must know that one cannot please everybody all the time. Perhaps the comments made were careless, or perhaps they were carefully considered. Regardless, the results seem to indicate that the site may eventually go back to its original intended use: news posted/voted on by the general masses, and not just a few selected elites.
The road ahead for digg may indeed be interesting.
I guess this is what a Democracy is though, isnt it? It is what the people want. If all the people think that somehing is interesting… what gives Digg the right to say otherwise? Just becuase I IM or Email my friends to let them know about something I find interesting doesnt mean that they too will find it interesting, or worth digging. The issue here isnt digging your personal things … if it were then I could understand this. Its about digging other people’s posts .. and I thought thats what Digg was for!
I don’t know what’s worse. Those horrible, vitriolic comments hurled at Malkin, or the fact that they were dugg up so many times.
How very tolerant of them.
Although I’ve been a user of del.icio.us for years, I recently joined both digg and Netscape a couple of weeks ago; and your entry here reminds me of the big question I’ve been having as well, which is how you increase the legitimacy and reliability of the articles being submitted and voted on at these places. I never worried about that at del.icio.us, because del.iciou.us (until its recent homepage makeover, that is) never really billed itself as “journalism,” but rather as “bookmarks” — just a bunch of random stuff that random people have been finding on the web, some of it bookmarked by a whole bunch of people at once. Both digg and Netscape, though, seem to be pushing more of an idea that you can come and get the “news” there — but then raises the question, of how one can establish the basic journalism work ethics that are required of any newspaper, magazine or website, before they’re taken seriously by the public as a legitimate publisher of journalism.
That’s what I find funny about all the people who say that Netscape is “paying their top posters,” because after several weeks there I’ve discovered that’s not true; the people they’re picking as their “Navigators” are not just based on number of submissions, but how factual those submissions are, how intriguing, how much they fill a current empty niche, whether the submitter fact-checks their descriptions, whether they write headlines in a dispassionate voice, whether they follow up regularly with updated information. Jason Calacanis has been public about this at his blog, that he sees this as a key in voter-based news sites — of making the information there are reliable as possible, and from a group of people who are as serious and educated about it as possible. Sounds like Kevin Rose has decided to implement such a thing as well, although in his case through algorithims instead of handpicking key staff.
It’ll be interesting I think to follow the fates of these two companies, as they institute two very different ways of trying to legitimize the submission/voting process more and more. For the record, I’ve been impressed with what Netscape’s been doing, and have so far found far less unreliable articles on their front pages than on digg’s. Also for the record, let me just make it clear that I know neither Calacanis nor Rose myself, nor receive any compensation from either company; I’m just an enthusiastic member at both!
http://www.freedavidirving.com
Well digg is a joke to me now, the amount of users on there that Digg down comments if they don’t like what one says is ridiculous, even comments that are not flames get digged down. Digg will never be what it could be, because the users on there are very close-minded and a niche group who ridicule people on there, etc.
So Digg allows users to game the system in their favor with small groups banding together and pooling resources to influence a larger share of the votes than their collective size would suggest. Gosh darn, that sounds like American democracy to me!
“If Digg is being corrupted by a relatively small group of users, the difference between Digg and the NYT becomes less clear.”
Actually, the difference is quite simple: the NYT is written by professionals who are paid for their service. Digg, on the other hand, relies on amatuers whose motives are bit suspect.
TheBluePanda.com
Have’t read the comments above, but…
My $0.02, just make sure no duplicates is present and ban blog-linkers (you should know what I mean, e.g. link to slashdot) and it would be much cleaner.
Posting Malkin’s comment invalidates your entire article.
Today, I love Digg. I had my gripes about it previously, but I have seen that the Digg team really is working hard to clean up the site.
This morning, I submitted a post to the abuse team where the poster admitted burying all stoires as Spam from a given source. Within 10 minutes, that post and the poster were deleted from the system. Within 10 minutes!
I was extremely impressed. So impressed, that I’m going to stop bad mouthing Digg and let them work out the kinks.
I’m rather happy that Michelle Malkin’s spam hasn’t been on the home page of Digg recently. I am sick of blog spam like Malkin’s ruining what is otherwise a very enjoyable website.
If Digg is going to truly reflect the wisdom of the masses it must deprecate the outliers. The best thing Digg could do is continually drive away their top 1% of posters. This will ensure that those most psychologically inclined to dominate the community are held at bay. And it ensures a consistent influx of new super-users, so that changes in the Internet readership are reflected on Digg…think of it like term limits. The idea that the most industrious users are essential to the success of Digg is counter to the concept of community-driven content. The key is a broad base of interested users, not a tiny cabal of intensely, personally committed leaders.
snowwrestler, I don’t think I’ve seen it put better anywhere. Your totally correct. Those 30 people dominate that site to their own opinion, to get wide consensus, you need to remove their influence, via algorithm or just plain old banning.
If people are upset, its because they can’t influence the site anymore, so they throw their rattles out of their pram.
Digg is not the NYT. The NYT *WRITES* and *PUBLISHES* stories, Digg *LINKS* to stories. Digg does not create original content, it mearly points it out.
Without the NYT and other media outlets, Digg would be pointless as it would have nothing to *LINK TO*.
Digg should ban users which use the numbers game against the “democratic” digg model.
It’s good to see they are modifying their algorithms to combat this. However I fear this is much like hackers on the internet .. it will be a continual fight.
John Dvorak called this a month ago in one of his PC Mag columns… As usual it only take a few people to screw it up for many…