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November 3, 2006

Top Digg Users Feeling Snubbed

Michael Arrington

88 comments »

Digg continues to grow, claiming 20 million visitors per month and an increasing amount of mainstream attention. But as traffic to Digg has grown, the incentive to “game” the site to get stories to the home page has also increased. Digg fights the abuse by using a number of weapons (deleting offending accounts, changing the core algorithm, etc.). But in doing so they risk alienating their most active users, who complain that many of the changes to Digg affect them more than the spammers.

The most recent changes to the Digg algorithm are aimed at grouping users who tend to act as a single voting block, effectively neutralizing their ability to move stories to the home page by simply acting together. One user, noting that the result was a significant decline in the home page stories by top users, said “it looks like the Digg staff is looking to get rid of its frequent posters.”

One person I spoke with tonight told me that 10 or so of the most powerful Digg users, him included, have set up a password protected IRC room to discuss the changes, saying “we’re in general agreement that we are no longer wanted, and our hours of submitting and keeping the site alive is no longer appreciated…some are leaving for newsvine, some for netscape etc…i have started participating in newsvine…i would appreciate it if you didnt name names in the post, because digg bans people over nothing.”

Digg is aware of this rebellion, of course, and is taking steps to stop it. In an update to the original blog post talking about the changes, founder Kevin Rose emphasized that their intention was not to point fingers at certain users: “The intention of the post absolutely wasn’t to point a finger at any individual or group. It was intended to openly highlight some of the things we’re doing to keep digg as useful, democratic, and devoid of misuse as possible.”

Digg is also aggresively deleting accounts of users that appear to be abusing the system. One top 20 user account, Webtech, was recently deleted as a part of this purge, even though the account appears to be legitimate (it was quickly reinstated). Many other top accounts were also deleted.

Part of the beauty of Digg has always been its simplicty. But the days of one user, one vote are long gone. In its place is a complicated and evolving algorithm that gives certain users less voting weight than other users. As long as users still feel that their participation matters, Digg will thrive. But if heavy users realize their voting weight decreases simply because they vote for a lot of stories that ultimately end up on the home page, they may have less of an incentive to participate.

As with any community, and probably more so with Digg, tranparency is important. The company continues to be very open in how they evolve and communicate regularly with users via the official Digg blog. But they don’t talk specifically about how exactly stories make it to the home page. They say this is to prevent further gaming, which makes sense. But it also has the side effect of causing some users to feel snubbed.

Digg is an ongoing experiment in a new kind of newspaper - one that has no human editors but rather promotes news stories based on a (weighted) democratic process. It’s important, and therefore constantly under a microscope. Keeping the most prolific Digg users happy is important, but ultimately its more important to have quality content on the site. And I will say this - the diversity and overall quality of stories the last few days has increased markedly. Like all storms, this will pass, and Digg will most likely continue to thrive.

Previous TechCrunch coverage of Digg is here.

Update: Two top Digg users write an open letter to Kevin Rose.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. RBA

    November 3rd, 2006 at 10:52 pm

    There’s no easy solution, and I agree Digg will continue being #1 in the space for quite a while, but don’t rule out other radically different approaches. coRank for instance promises to offer a number of things that Digg will not even consider doing.

  2. Anshul Jain

    November 3rd, 2006 at 11:03 pm

    I agree that the quality of stories has increased markedly in the past few days and top users should not be complaining. All of us use digg because of the content and nothing else. They should keep contributing, thats all, like all of us.

  3. SearchEngines

    November 3rd, 2006 at 11:27 pm

    The Algos did send out number of false positives against very active users.

    It was understandably nothing personal - but inherent flaws in necessary programming attempts.

    Some Valid Accounts were deleted and some IP addresses were Banned :P :-P

    As a long time top user - - - it was fun while it lasted…… but after the first false positive - - - - just started submitting those ‘would-have-been’ Diggs to another Web 2.0 Bookmarking Source.

    http://battellemedia.com/searc.....published/

    And become THEIR top User

  4. Stephen

    November 3rd, 2006 at 11:36 pm

    I think Digg has a long way to go in their banning policies - several staff here (behind the same ip address) - saw an article on digg and emailed it to each other - and then several of us were banned without any explanation - even though many of us HAD been long time Digg users for voting for the same article.

    It is going to be a common event that like minded people work in an organisation and that they will vote for same / similar articles and if they get banned for Voting - what is the point of voting ?

    Digg was Cool - now its turning into Big Brother.

    I am not sure why did didnt send an email saying it was suspicious behaviour - please explain and that your vote for that article was not counted - a less heavy handed approach - rather then next time i signed into Digg - just getting a message your account has been banned.

  5. Stephen Sclafani

    November 3rd, 2006 at 11:41 pm

    Digg has such a large and active community that even if the top 10/20/etc. users decided to leave the next 10/20/etc. would simply take their place. Sometimes this has to happen for a community to grow. You never want to get into a situation where you are being held hostage by a few top users.

  6. Mike Abundo

    November 3rd, 2006 at 11:45 pm

    And what exactly are the things coRank promises to offer, Rogelio?

  7. Stephen

    November 3rd, 2006 at 11:49 pm

    But with these social network - user contributed style sites - isnt the ratio that for every million readers - there is a few whom comment - and even less whom contribute to the site.

    I seem to recall reading somewhere that there was only several hundred people that actually bothered to add anything to Digg - the rest of the millions just read it.

    If you lose the top 10 or 20 of only a few hundred then that will have to start hurting Digg

  8. VelkyMX

    November 3rd, 2006 at 11:57 pm

    This is one of the reasons we rolled out our own digg type site (inchicks.com).

    Great article guys!

  9. Orli Yakuel

    November 4th, 2006 at 12:04 am

    How do you see digg thrive like that Mike? by the time a story get to the front page you’ve probably heard/read about it from a different source (whatever big news site that out there). This is what I’ve liked so much about digg, to be the first to know about everything so I was reading on a daily basis, from the front page. Now, It looks like it taking that page a lot of time to move.

    There is one more change that you’ve miss. In the old system, when a story had 50digs and more, every user were getting automatically another story to his record. This option is no longer existent.

    I’m not saying that without the topusers digg can not continue to succeed. I am saying that 70-90diggs per post is way to exaggerated and they need to change that for their own good.

  10. Ryan Underdown

    November 4th, 2006 at 12:07 am

    Obviously 10-20 people leaving isn’t going to sink Digg. However the general attitude that the Digg staff is exhibiting towards their userbase doesn’t exactly encourage me to participate anymore. My username there is elebrio and I got deleted without even a message from the staff. I emailed them and they reinstated me immediately but the general disregard for any users when their community is inherently user-driven bothers me. It seems like we are merely a necessary evil in their eyes.

  11. RBA

    November 4th, 2006 at 12:39 am

    #6 - Mike, some of them are somehow reflected in the video :-)

    #8 - VelkyMX, Digg-like verticals are fine. I think we’re going to see more and more of those, but we still need to see how this type of “crowditorial” process plays out of the early-adopters/tech circle. If Netscape is any clue, it doesn’t play that well.

    #10 - Ryan, when you have under your control so many users, and so many people also trying to game your system, it’s nearly impossible to be fair and square at all times. If anything, I think a bigger concern is how you balance building a community with building a business.

  12. charles

    November 4th, 2006 at 12:48 am

    I seriously doubt the efficacy and functional ability of Diggs’ voting algorithm. Whenever serious questions are raised like the ones raised by the top Diggers being banned from the site, Digg trots out the extremely convienent excuse that they so often retail to the public when these situations happen. Thar excuse is always “We are adjusting the core algorithm to make the system more democratic”. I find their actions highly suspect. The whole thing looks to me like a very un-democratice ponzi scheme where vague explanations of an ever evolving algorithm are simply a way to deflect serious inquiry and attention away from the fact that they themselves are gaming the system by manipulating stories and user accounts. I suspect their algorithm is a piece of crap.

    It’s about time someone asked some hard questions to Digg. Arrington are you up to the job? or will you simply spout more glad-handing, techo love puff pieces about how Digg is a new kind of newspaper and more relevant than the New York Times?

  13. Paul Montgomery

    November 4th, 2006 at 12:49 am

    Of course, Kevin could take a leaf from the book of Markus Frind, and cheerfully announce that he intentionally purges his top 50 users every so often to break up the cliques as a matter of policy.

    http://plentyoffish.wordpress......-networks/

  14. Smaran

    November 4th, 2006 at 1:06 am

    My username is koregaonpark and the same thing happened to me. Deleted without a notice. There is a major air of superiority and a we-dont-care attitude not only towards digg’s topusers, but to all of digg’s users in general.

  15. Amit Chowdhry

    November 4th, 2006 at 1:06 am

    Agreed with Anshul Jain:

    Top Digg users need to take Governor Ahnold Schwarzenegger’s advice and SHTOP WHINING!!! SHTOP IT!!!
    http://www.ebaumsworld.com/200.....rank4.html

  16. Klaus

    November 4th, 2006 at 1:22 am

    What is the point of being a Digg topuser?

    We all should know, socialism is not working when it goes mainstream.

  17. Ted

    November 4th, 2006 at 1:23 am

    boo fuckin’ hoo. people who give a shit if their stories are constantly on the front page are retards. Great job helping some random dudes you don’t know make millions by posting links. Digg should get rid of all uber-digg-lover-dorks.

  18. Darren

    November 4th, 2006 at 1:54 am

    @ted, there would be no dig without those so called uber-digg-lover-dorks

    also lets not forget most of em were there at the beginning putting the content up.

    I think the simple solution is to flag them as super users that are allowed 1 vote.

    Digg is flawed at the end of the day and they need to break out of their current ideas for the site and look at doing something new.

  19. alan patrick

    November 4th, 2006 at 2:13 am

    Good post.

    Tim Berners Lee made some interesting points yesterday about the risk of the web filling up with fraudsters, cheats, spammers et al - and bloggers are potentially part of the problem.

    Digg is a very interesting example of this, (as in fact is the hullaballoo surrounding TechCrunch’s independence from the companies it logs about.)

    I blogged about it in this post, but I think a debate about favoured users vs Wisdom of Crowds is well overdue.

  20. itsyourstage

    November 4th, 2006 at 3:02 am

    1. digg will soon sell out to either yahoo or news corp and so all these user related points will not matter

    2. the mistake is with the ppl . ifv 10 unknown ppl forma cartel on digg they get disqualified, and if these hifi diggers do it its okay? what democracy in news site?

  21. jtwilkins

    November 4th, 2006 at 3:20 am

    This big deal about diggs top users is all a Jason Calacanius stir up trouble. If anything digg would be much better with out the same 50 people posting the majority of stores on the the site. Most users of digg are very disenfranchised due to the fact that unless you are a top poster of someone with a great deal of digg friends you stories easily get duped and promoted by someone more popular then yourself.

    Killing the top digg users will just give everyone else a better chance, but it wont be a day before a crowd of diggers just replaces the old diehards and the new submitters.

  22. Stephen

    November 4th, 2006 at 5:43 am

    I think that Dig has had its day and its time to move on - to what - I am not sure but I am sure there is something new coming up soon.

    Who knows Kevin Rose - may be secretly showing it on the Digg home page at the moment so that his next venture also gets a ’suspicious head start’

  23. AAAZ

    November 4th, 2006 at 6:35 am

    In my opinion, new algorithm punishes diggers with friends, hence top-diggers fall into that group by default, in new system if people like what you submit, you are punished for that.

    Basically it works like this, say you post a story, and 20 friends digg you, under new system (algo) digg requires 80 (20 X 4 ) additional non-friendly diggs on same story, and if you are lucky after (80+ 20) 100 diggs you might be on Front page, but a good chance is, you might not, even after 100 diggs.

    In new system, essentially your friends digg is equal to (-4) diggs or you require four additional diggs because a friend of yours dugg your story, so its harmful to have friends in new algo, on Digg.

    And more popular you become at submitting good stories, your chances of getting to front page become less over the time, since more friends are digging you. And this applies to new users as well, as they will acquire new friends, especially if they post a good story. This algo assumes that new diggers will be joining digg everyday and will post great stuff, and hurts old diggers by scrutinizing their posting at digg. This is poor assumption. Due to the fact certain diggers (old or new) post quality stuff most of the time.

    In new system, at Digg Front Page, you will see a Digger most likely without friends, posts occasionally, and if digger chooses to become regular poster, he/she will fall into new Digg algo trap, and hence will be punished for posting, because he/she has friends.

  24. Smaran

    November 4th, 2006 at 7:00 am

    Wow… that’s a perfect description of the new algorithm and its consequences. Bang on.

    Digg’s new motto: out with the old and trusted and in with new and naïve.

  25. Mike Abundo

    November 4th, 2006 at 7:55 am

    You shouldn’t punish users for loyalty.

  26. Patrick

    November 4th, 2006 at 8:06 am

    I personally find the most interesting page to be the Friends submitted/dugg page, not the Popular page. For one thing it takes too long for a story to appear in the popular page. A tsunami could be racing towards California and by the time it would hit the front page, the Digg colo would be underwater. Digg could go a long way to making everyone’s home page, a combination of popular + friends. It would make the site more dynamic, more viral, and more selective (select only friends with shared interests.)

    Also, I was pleasantly surprised by Netscape the other day. I think the content on the site really complements Digg. Less tech, more politics (too much politics), more offbeat stories.

  27. shadilac

    November 4th, 2006 at 8:09 am

    When you promise things like 1 user 1 vote you get yourself in trouble to begin with. They should just stop showing the number of votes. If it’s becoming a calculation then the number has no meaning now anyway. That’s why reddit and feedbite make more sense. And there needs to be a different incentive to get people to post.

  28. bfos

    November 4th, 2006 at 8:54 am

    Who are these loosers?

    They honestly think that Digg made these changes because they no longer care about the top users of the site? How does that make sense at all?

    I imagine that if these users are spending all this time finding interesting stories, that they are at least half way intelligent enough to understand the issues of people and companies that abuse the site.

    Here’s another way to put it. What should Digg do? Just keep the algorithem the same and let companies buy their way to the top of Digg. Wow, that would make the site SO useful. It would be the top destination to not just find spam, but the “best” spam.

    No, this is more of an issue of pride for the users. They no longer get to see their names in the glorious fonts on such a popular website. So they’ll hop from site to site, because every social-news website will have to adjust their algorithems at some point. And, no one will miss them.

  29. fatmike

    November 4th, 2006 at 9:12 am

    this story was submitted to digg by koregaonpark. it has now been censored and removed from the upcoming stories.

    just thought everyone should know.

  30. Smaran

    November 4th, 2006 at 9:30 am

    What fun…

  31. Raffy

    November 4th, 2006 at 10:24 am

    +digg bfos’s comment! (Oh wait.)

    This is all about user pride. Sorry, that’s just not something you can “leverage” except to drum up stories on blogs that feed on the rumor mill. These complaints will not precipitate change.

    Oh, and don’t give me that crap about “these users were there in the beginning.” Kevin Rose was a celebrity before digg. He had a lot of notoriety, is good looking, and started a site with a damn good idea. The chances of it NOT taking off were pretty slim.

  32. Erichb1

    November 4th, 2006 at 10:29 am

    Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Top digg users not being respected.

    Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!

    Please just take your ball and go home. Who needs these cry babies.

    Digg, like everything else was cool at first and now it is not so cool. Who cares, Kevin is just trying to cash out asap before he can’t. If he doesn’t allay the frees of the buyers that his site is just dependent on a few groups of people, they won’t buy the site. Hence initially down play their importance in public, but then secretly work with them in the background. It will be the same here.

    Kevin is just looking for the fastest way out for the most bucks. If he really believed in the site, he would not be ready to sell out already. He cares nothing for the longevity of the project.

  33. Sean

    November 4th, 2006 at 11:29 am

    I am in the top 900 on digg. I love using digg but it seems that it is overrun by new users.

    About a month ago I saw a duplicate story and put a link to the digg story from about 1.5 years before that. The guy replied “Most of us weren’t on digg then, so it’s OK to resubmit stories for the new users”. I just about lost it, that pretty much summarizes digg these days.

  34. Get Over Yourselves

    November 4th, 2006 at 11:49 am

    Oh, please. Like Digg won’t go on unless “popular” people submit stories. Do you know how many dupes there are on Digg now? Stories appear multiple times - but the ones that reach the front page are usually not the one submitted first, but the one by the user with the most friends. Digg should remove this feature entirely and make everything anonymous. They definitely should stop posting stats on users.

    Get over yourselves, dorks.

  35. bonch

    November 4th, 2006 at 12:55 pm

    I’m so sick of these whiney top users who are all upset because other people’s stories might have as much of a chance as theirs. Digg is supposed to be about stories submitted by the community, not stories submitted by a small cabal of elite users acting as editors and deciding what makes it to the front page.

    I say good riddance. Digg was supposed to be great because of its lack of editors. Now a small group of users found out a way to become editors of the front page and are crying because their power is being taken away.

  36. Darren

    November 4th, 2006 at 1:04 pm

    maybe time for a talkcrunch cast with Kevin Rose to talk about it and the rumoured buyout

  37. TrueSatan

    November 4th, 2006 at 1:07 pm

    I’m nothing more than a casual user of Digg who wishes to find good content on a regular basis with as little hassle as possible…sadly Digg is less and less able to fulfil that simple requirement. Use of Firefox with Greasemonkey providing a script to block some of the junk certainly helps but even that level of rather extreme tinkering leaves a horribly large signal to noise ratio.

    I have no interest whatever in the “community” aspects of such sites and thus don’t seek out, or want, site “friends”…in fact, to me, such systems are nothing more than a pathetic joke.

    Consider this…as a casual user the RSS feed is the way I choose to get information from Digg but said feed is so badly managed as to be nigh on useless…for instance:

    1) The feed is so out of date that by the time it shows me an article said article has been seen and forgotten by almost all other users so any comment I might bother to add to it is unlikely to be worth the effort taken to add it.

    2) The links in the feed don’t work in a sensible manner…follow any of the Digg site links and you are taken to your log-in screen not the actual article…even though you have cookies enabled and have ticked the box on Digg to “remember me”.

    3) Having got to Digg you then try to find the article in question…more than 9 times out of 10 the search engine will fail to find it for you… The way I get round that is to note the name of the submitting member shown in the feed and find the article via that…a shamefully awful system.

    4) Page load speeds for Digg are so abysmally slow that as a casual user they try my patience such that I am highly unlikely to wish to be other than a casual user.

    5) The site’s ability to stop and block duplicate stories is next to non-existant thus leading to a failure to give me the easy access to good content that is my only interest in the site.

    All in all I’ve about had it with Digg and would wonder if anyone will be daft enough to buy the site for the sort of money its owners seem to think it is worth…the web 2.0 bubble isn’t quite that big.

  38. superfunhappyslide

    November 4th, 2006 at 2:28 pm

    “A newspaper without editors?” More like a Nintendo fansite with YouTube videos. Digg was idiotic before the change and it’s idiotic now, the only difference is now new stories don’t get posted as often.

    It’s funny looking back at all the hype about the wonders of Web 2.0 and then the most prominent example of the user-generated wisdom of the long tail of the crowd turns out to be millions of high school kids talking about how they can’t wait to play Red Steel.

    It’s also funny to see all the early adopter Digg users whining about the huge influx of new users as the site gains popularity. Like that’s never happened before in the history of the internets.

  39. Choco

    November 4th, 2006 at 3:24 pm

    “one that has no human editors” - I so much want to agree with you on this one, but the whole story of this post sort of disproves just that.
    Much is automated true, but it does become more and more of a sales-pitch to me rather then the reality. Why don’t we just frankly admit that large sites just need human editors to control and edit because humans are just too smart to be left unattended and unedited.

    On the other side, if truelly the “automatic digg what friends digg” function is reversed through the algorithm does it then truelly remain useful?? But then again, I’m against automatic digging as a whole anyway. Why? Because it simply means stories get dugg even when the user hasn’t read any of it. Will a topdigger with 10000 stories dugg be a better reviewer then one that only diggs a couple? Definitely not. Also it degenerates the commenting on topics of those people who would normally then read the articles. Maybe it is a good idea to use the tool as post statistics for researchers and reviews. Like a good newspaper, quality is achieved by actual readership of writers and readers not just numbers.

    ps. wouldn’t it be a great idea to add an preview comment button?

  40. Bryce

    November 4th, 2006 at 4:41 pm

    I kinda agree with what they are doing. These top users who have many stories on the homepage are making it harder for other users to get their stories onto the homepage.

  41. Jimmy Daniels

    November 4th, 2006 at 4:50 pm

    If aynone is interested, we have started a digg type site for security stories and issues. http://www.faill.com

  42. Videokarma.com

    November 4th, 2006 at 7:02 pm

    should be interesting, I’ve been using the service and can’t seem to ever get a story promoted.. as hard as I try.. There is something inherently wrong with the concept. It requires reworking to make it a truly “organic” social networking or Web 2.0 service.

  43. Xuru

    November 4th, 2006 at 7:59 pm

    With so much traffic to be gained from a front page story, Digg has an uphill battle to fight the spammers. I hope they have some talented AI guys in writing their spam algos.

  44. David Mackey

    November 4th, 2006 at 8:55 pm

    Digg has a big challenge in front of it. This gaming thing has become quite the problem. I hope they pull through, as I really enjoy them and have long ago abandoned Slashdot for Digg.

  45. engtech

    November 4th, 2006 at 10:19 pm

    Digg is hopelessly flawed. Newly submitted posts can’t get votes unless gaming occurs because too many stories are being submitted and the upcoming queue has too much turn-over.

    So what’s going to happen when the readers of a website start looking like a voting block to the algorithm? Yeah, we vote for the same stories because we read the same site. This is ridiculous.

  46. Cos

    November 4th, 2006 at 11:47 pm

    “But they don’t talk specifically about how exactly stories make it to the home page. They say this is to prevent further gaming, which makes sense.”

    Actually, no, it doesn’t make sense. It’s a particularly misguided form of security by obscurity. They’re trying to build an algorithm that is valuable only if people don’t know how it works - or at least strongly tempting themselves to do so. The result is a less robust algorithm, one that’s less resistant to abuse, and is protected from abuse only to the extent that people don’t know what the algorithm is. It rewards the few who do know how it works, or who guess correctly, or who figure it out some other way, rather than rewarding “good” digg behavior across the board. And if it ever leaks, any “features” that are based on the secrecy go away.

    Stupid, stupid, stupid. If they want a good algorithm, it needs to be transparent, too.

  47. Pramit

    November 5th, 2006 at 12:10 am

    I think Digg’s time is up. It have written about in detail at my site. However, I am sure Digg will be written for bringing a degree of coolness to the boring business of news.

  48. markg

    November 5th, 2006 at 12:41 am

    Digg has been great but it wont scale nicely. We’ve seen this with many similar services. Example: Epinions, in the day, was faced with the same issues; reviews fovertime fell in relevance and the best reviewers got bored and were displaced by those without the expertise to review. After time, we all forgot and moved on but when is that going to happen to Digg? Now, next year, year after? My 2 bits

  49. Digstar

    November 5th, 2006 at 7:25 am

    “Top Digg Users Feeling Snubbed”

    I’m a top Digg user, and I don’t care about algorithm changes. But please continue to stir up controversy to boost your traffic.

    It’s their playground: If they change the rules and I don’t’ like it, I’m sure many will take my place if move on.

  50. Webomatica

    November 5th, 2006 at 2:37 pm

    The question is: Is digg (or any other social website) great because of the work of these handful of people, or is it really “the more people the better the website”?

  51. E. David Zotter

    November 5th, 2006 at 4:27 pm

    I love it. The script kiddies are making trouble for the dark tipper (i.e. mr. wanna-be hacker himself…kevin rose).

    Secondly, Hey Kevin..you’re not able to manipulate the standings on a whim anymore. As an end user I was getting a little tired of reading Kevin Rose self promotion hype from third parties. Everyone is watching now… the fake weighting can’t go on my friends.

    They are spending all kinds of time sculpting the frontpage and manually balancing content for the 99% of users that only watch and don’t participate. Seriously, how many techtv tss content from yesteryear is being rehashed to the frontpage? No more promotion of LEO, okay?

    Digg is dead, I’m going to invest my time making someone else a web 2.0 millionaire… someone that cares about the community, not just themselves.

    Regards,
    E. David Zotter

  52. UK Hosting

    November 6th, 2006 at 5:00 am

    Digg is a community site and all users and stories should be treated equally. Digg should support the community and the Friends and not mess with the promotion algorithm, which doesn’t do anything to help build the community or encourage people to have Friends.

  53. barb dybwad

    November 6th, 2006 at 4:20 pm

    the more sensible approach to handling dupes would be to prevent people from submitting them, by checking each submission against a unique key for each story — i.e. the URL. surely this would be more effective than alienating your top users by banning their accounts without notice?

  54. screenwalker

    November 6th, 2006 at 6:29 pm

    We have today pointed to a situation at Digg that a story that nobody can access is “spammed” to the front page. If things like that happen this means that actual “users” have long been marginalized and have no influence at Digg anymore.

    And there are now already people online who offer promoting your story at Digg as a service…..

    So besides this 2 questions:
    1. How can you recommend a story that you have never seen?
    2. What does Digg do about it?

    No 1: Well if you follow the model that Digg is using as their current “selling point” you can’t.

    No2: Digg acted swiftly. It has removed our story showing that (currently) 600 Digg users - and as we have learned recently only 20% of their users are digging at all - have dugg a story they have never seen.

    The story nobody has seen is still going strong…

    The web site as well as cache or mirrors still show nothing when trying to access it. Maybe we are already at a point with web sites as big as Digg doing recommendation services can hardly stay up with their weaponry to fight the spammers.

    The info is at: http://www.duvet-dayz.com/archives/2006/11/06/126/
    The story in question is:
    http://digg.com/design/The_His.....reen_shots

  55. michael

    November 6th, 2006 at 7:11 pm

    http://www.plime.com has potential for being better than digg

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