Troubles in Diggville

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1. Startups.in/India
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 9:02 pm

   Is there a monetary benefit that drives these groups?

2. max
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 9:02 pm

   hmm… yes, so what, that is what digg is about, you cant really stop a large group of people, as with everything…

3. Mark Devlin
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 9:04 pm

   “speed bumbs” gives me a strange mental image.

4. Kevin Burton
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 9:05 pm

   “Kevini says” …. is that meant to be diminutive?

   If so then on behalf of all Kevin’s everywhere I officially complain.

   

5. BloodJunkie
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 9:05 pm

   Digg’s top user just announced he’s fed up and leaving:

   http://neothoughts.com/2006/09.....s-goodbye/

6. RBA
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 9:19 pm

   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?

7. Stephen Sclafani
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 9:44 pm

   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.

8. Drama 2.0
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 9:51 pm

   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.

9. ipearx
   

   September 6th, 2006 at 9:54 pm

   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/

10. greg
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:10 pm

    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

11. Jord
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:19 pm

    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 …

12. MacStansbury
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:23 pm

    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.

13. Amos
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 10:37 pm

    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.

14. Tony
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 11:06 pm

    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

15. alan
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 11:38 pm

    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.

16. Arjun
    

    September 6th, 2006 at 11:57 pm

    This is why I gave up on digg a while ago. Try reddit instead - the articles there are refreshingly well-rounded and diverse.

17. Arun
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 12:23 am

    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..

18. Stephan Tual
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 2:02 am

    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.

19. Search Engines WEB
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 2:23 am

    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

20. steward
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 2:49 am

    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.

21. Jacob Smith
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 3:38 am

    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.

22. gVibe06
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 3:48 am

    “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.

    

23. Evan
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 4:28 am

    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.

24. Brian
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 4:36 am

    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!

25. Chance McClain
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 4:41 am

    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.

26. bobo
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 4:51 am

    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.

27. Sean
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 5:08 am

    “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.

28. Kyle Scholz
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 5:23 am

    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!

29. Mosche Katzmann
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 5:27 am

    digg is a quick daily fix for retards. Much ado about nothing.

30. Darren McLaughlin
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 5:31 am

    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.

31. Peter C
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 5:47 am

    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??

32. Frank Cefalu
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 5:58 am

    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.

33. josen
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 6:31 am

    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.

34. Bryan
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 6:32 am

    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!

35. Eric B
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 6:40 am

    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.

36. Jason Pettus
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 7:04 am

    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!

37. David Irving
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 7:05 am

    http://www.freedavidirving.com

38. Carter
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 7:20 am

    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.

39. Mark Perini
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 7:22 am

    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!

40. Chris
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 7:47 am

    “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.

41. Fear The Panda
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 7:54 am

    TheBluePanda.com

42. itsnotvalid
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 8:18 am

    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.

43. JRZ
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 8:33 am

    Posting Malkin’s comment invalidates your entire article.

44. helix400
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 8:35 am

    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.

45. Rick
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 8:36 am

    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.

46. snowwrestler
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 8:39 am

    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.

47. Paul
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 9:19 am

    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.

48. Adam
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 9:26 am

    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*.

49. Fence Chat
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 9:31 am

    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.

50. Jeff
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 9:33 am

    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…

51. helix400
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 9:35 am

    Digg is quickly fixing the system. Right now, a Malkin story made the main page, apparently because users are no longer able to bury it away as “Spam”.

    http://digg.com/political_opin....._Guess_why

    This would never have survived the burying abuse yesterday.

52. Eric B
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 9:41 am

    How are Malkin’s articles spam? They’re political blog posts being dugg on the political section of Digg.

53. vance
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 9:41 am

    wow. people are up in arms about this kind of behavior on digg but are totally willing to accept it in every other institution they come in contact with ( including their government )? perhaps a little reflection is in order.

    oh and the masses are not wise. as digg has become more popular the quality of it’s content has degraded considerably. digg is the perfect example of why democracy does not and has never existed. the masses are base, short sighted, self interested, and out for little more than amusement. which is why i think the competing interest groups at digg are actually good for the quality of it’s content.

54. Eric B
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 9:41 am

    How are Malkin’s articles spam? They’re political blog posts being dugg on the political section of Digg. The only “problem” with them is that they are written by a conservative woman.

55. Chris
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 10:18 am

    snowwrestler is spot on regarding term limits. I once read a line (I don’t recall where, sadly) that said, “if absolute power corrupts absolutely, then endless power corrupts endlessly.”

    Adam is right too. Imagine if there were tons of film critics but no films. That’s kind of how it’s like right now, with tons of sites like Fark, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, etc.

56. Carter
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 10:38 am

    p9s50W5k4GUD2c6 quit. Good! Get lost, we don’t want you on Digg anymore, nerd. Time for a new uprising and HONESTY within the digg site.

57. Terry Zulit
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 10:50 am

    Well this was enevitable I suppose. Anything web application or site has big traffic, will used by others for their own ends (well….they’ll try) I’ve seen webmasters on Digg posting streams of weak articles that NO-ONE Diggs.

    What? They think they are getting a Google PR kick for their articles bieng in Digg?

    I hope their new algo cleans some of this up soon.

58. Chris
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 10:58 am

    I understand Michael Arrington’s suggestion regarding the weight change for direct links versus upcoming stories clicks. However, I would be concerned about the audiences that click through on direct links from RSS feeds. I realize many of those stories are at the top already but if you have an RSS feed to specific subcategory then the story may never really gain momentum.

    The note from Kevin Rose was a nice touch to keep the community informed and aware. I’m glad that with the web 2.0 movement that we are seeing more communication from the site leadership.

    As to the algorithm being open-source, I support Digg’s secrecy if it means better quality results. This same methodology has been tremendously effective for putting Google at the top of search engines, after all.

    I digg. I crunch.

59. Bob Boydston
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 11:44 am

    My interpretation of the foregoing:

    Power corrupts

    Masses dumb it down

60. Anonymous
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 1:04 pm

    Every time Kevin Rose diggs / comments / submits a story, it is destined to make the front page since everyone has him as a friend. Therefore, what Kevin wants on Digg, Kevin gets. Wouldn’t it be better if he just participated anonymously?

61. TanNg
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 1:20 pm

    I’m new to Digg, but Digging around for a mound, my impression is

    * Digg is more balanced than blogs. Note that not only story itself, but comments matter. As Scoobleizer said, blogsphere is living in buble.
    * Digg is deeper and more diversified than online magazines. I’m using Cnet news.com less and less for tech news.
    * Digg is far more effective than Google news, Yahoo news in term of discovering good an hot content

    So although the concern about democracy is well-founded Digg is still more democratic than other exsisting media.

62. Peter
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 1:51 pm

    gosh forbid people actually organize and take advantage of so-called ‘democracy’. those proles should have known better - they should have known that corporatists like Michelle Malkin would whine that their right-wing slush funds were still unable to overcome the power of regular citizens, acting in concert, to decide for themselves what are the best stories.

    the founding fathers were anti-democracy, and now Digg is, too.

    And the greatest enemy of the state in the US or anywhere else is its own population. That’s what they’re really afraid of. In fact, the Founding Fathers called it the “great beast” which “has to be controlled” because the population can in fact compel the government to change policies. And these interactions make an enormous difference.

    Digg can subject itself to the will of the people or the will of the corporatists. Life is full of decisions. They’ll be much worse off for this move. But I’m not cryin. Yardbarker, where you at? Netscape, where you at? New competitors yet to be named, where you at?

63. JRS
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 1:53 pm

    So the problem appears to be that diggs are unlimited. Any user can digg as many articles as they wish. To solve this “control” problem limit everyone to 10 diggs per day or some other arbitrary number. Now before I digg an article I’ll have to determine if its really worth using one of my daily diggs.

64. Peter
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 2:05 pm

    tyranny of the majority

    oh - like the tyranny of the majority of Americans (80% or so) who want universal healthcare? that _is_ pretty tyrannical. i mean, imagine we all had health care just because 80% of the population wanted it? golly, that would suck. just who do those ‘majority’ think they are, anyways? they think they deserve, like, a say or something in what goes on up in this joint? losers. good thing we didn’t let them have their tyranny or majority or whatever.

    that phrase is straight-up propaganda. easy-to-recite, meaningless phrases are for right-wing corporate hacks and right-wing television propagandists.

65. galway web dev
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 2:10 pm

    p9s50W5k4GUD2c6 is dead long live p9s50W5k4GUD2c6

66. Evan
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 3:18 pm

    Here is our interview with Kevin Rose and Jay. Well its not an Q and A interview but its good

    its up on Mshift right now
    and on the front page of digg

67. Bob
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 4:15 pm

    OMG, did you guys see what was said at MATDC?

    Link:

    http://www.mattandthat.com/#digg

68. Graeme
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 7:32 pm

    “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. ”

    >> seems to be like in the real “democratic” life

69. PJ
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 8:10 pm

    All this talk about Digg makes Techmeme.com feel lonely.

70. xray
    

    September 7th, 2006 at 10:18 pm

    I think too many people are seeing this as taking a hammer to the algorithm, when it is more likely a small tap or tweak.

    More or less “weight” is also a relative term since we have no idea of specific numbers in the algorithm.

    “Top Diggers”? How meaningful is it to tell a woman she is beautiful if I go around the office and another 30% of the staff as well? I dig rarely, and only those stories which are *OUTSTANDING*, not the usual crap. I think this thing about Top Diggers being valuable is actually just the opposite. They pollute the system with their valueless contributions. I’m glad the top diggers left…

    Also, for those of you out there who think “what the hell… why not just let the most dugg stories go to the front, regardless”, can look under American History: The Federalist Papers, arguably the most insightful documents to the founding of the U.S. Think of gangs who promote stories for whatever their motivation is, to be known as “Tyranny of the minority”.

71. Alan
    

    September 8th, 2006 at 1:34 am

    It seems Digg is under the control of a few users, NYT is under editorial review of fewer, what’s the difference? I think the initial idea Digg got organized upon has been lost… just my two cents
    thanks

72. Stephan Tual
    

    September 8th, 2006 at 3:03 am

    Alan (#71), the difference between Digg being under the control of a few users, and NYT being under editorial review, is that the NYT has consistently proven they were maintaining a certain level of integrity and professionalism, while as far as I know the Digg top users could all be opiniated 13yo with nothing better to do and nobody to answer to.

    This leads to a steady ‘I digg this down because I don’t like what it says/I digg this up because the author is my friend’, mob-like behaviour (there’s been a rash of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ type articles), and no objectivity whatsoever in what makes the front page. Nobody is obliged to check their sources on Digg, for example, and people are *very* quick to judge (read: agree with the OP because it’s the ‘cool thing to do’.

    “truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity, impartiality, fairness and public accountability” (I quote Wikipedia’s “Journalism ethics and standards”’s page). People have come to expect this, and it’s natural for them to expect it online, too. That’s why when sites like Digg (or ironically, Wikipedia), end up in the mainstream, serious questions ought to be raised - the first one being, ‘who is accoutable’. On digg, the answer is ‘no one’.

73. Alan
    

    September 8th, 2006 at 5:17 am

    Stephan,

    This is exactly what i meant… I mentioned NYT because I’ve read several articles where Digg compares itself to NYT in term of page views, alexa ranking and more…

    but what Digg seriously lacks in is exactly this quality and professional editorial control older media outlets maintain…etc, etc

    in my view Digg is good web 2.0 like web site, trendy, good alexa ranking, a proven tool for a limited group of people to do web based PR, but nothing more, I see no serious business model behind that would potentially last longer and outlive its trend…

    Btw, the same situation has recently happened with Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica … the first has plenty of crap content, spammy links and sometimes plays serious but not fair role on corporate level by proclaiming already popular brands even further while the second hasn’t low-quality content, never performed cheap PR for others, yet the first one outgrows in popularity its old rival. What about dmoz.org…this popular directory from the nineties where “top users ala Digg’s” publish “very selectively” the web sites , etc, etc…

    I think something bigger stands behind all that happens, it is all about the “war” in between the old traditional names and businesses and the newly established yet popular concepts.. etc, etc,
    Thanks for the attention anyway

74. Jeff the astonished
    

    September 8th, 2006 at 9:31 am

    I’ve managed to stumble upon many words like democracy, journalism and news…In most cases they’re used in the same sentence…

    Shame on all of you for thinking that the news is journalism.

    IT’S ENTERTAINMENT!

    The finger of shame is also pointed to those of you that think democracy has anything to do with the private world of business.

    Digg that!

75. Paul
    

    September 8th, 2006 at 8:40 pm

    Here is a good example of how Digg users can bury a story.
    http://hubpages.com/hub/Digg_U.....shing_Site

76. Solomon
    

    February 10th, 2007 at 3:13 am

    I add 10 diggs for interest news but i do not see top and coment. Help me please. :O(