Do you dig Digg? Do you trust that the top stories are really the top stories? Or are they being manipulated? In yet another concession that some of the results may be artificially torqued (don’t people have better things to do with their time?), Digg CEO Kevin Rose has decided to remove a long-time feature called “Top Diggers” that highlighted the efforts of 5,000 of its leading users.
The question is why Kevin, why? Why remove it simply because these Diggers are “being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg”. Who are these outlets are why do they have such clout? Is this an admission that some or many of your “Top Diggers” are manipulating the results? You call the criticism by these mysterious outlets a “disappointing trend” but you fail to disclose why they are, in fact, disappointing.
Clearly, Digg is have a problem with perception in an industry where you’re cool today and passe tomorrow (e.g. Friendster). Rose is trying to be pro-active rather than being forced to do something dramatic when a major problem emerges out of nowhere. The question is whether the growing criticism is water lapping against the shore or a tsunami. If Digg is seen as being inaccurate, manipulated, less-than-honest, etc., it creates the real possibility “Digg This” could quickly become less prominent around the Web.
That said, Digg is increasingly been seen as the default place on the Web for people to “vote” on the news. As Rose says in his blog posts, Digg is now getting 5,000 story submissions a day, and it has generated more than 50 million “Diggs” since it started in November 2004. This, in theory, should give Digg some clout and some goodwill to combat attacks from “some outlets”. If I were Rose, I’d address the concerns of his critics but, honestly, I’d be as or more concerned about building a sustainable business model to turn all those Diggs into dollars.
For more, check out Deep Jive Interests,who is surprised it took Rose so long to make this decision and why he’s not doing more; Technology Evangelist, and Pro Blogger.
Technorati Tags: Digg, Kevin Rose
3 Comments
I work in media monitoring, so I have been watching Digg for a while now and found it to be an interesting tool. I’m not sure you could turn this community in to a major money maker, but with all those visitors I can see why everyone thinks that he should. Are their results biased… probably, but then again, most news aggregators are biased to some extent, or are completely automated machines that have little reasoning, of ability to place things in context. Digg to me is a cool site for people who enjoy reading news, and it reflects its users, who are a bunch of humans with individual perspectives and agendas.
As a trend tracker, I was “in love” with Digg in the last 6 to 9 months but I’ve recently discovered that TechMeme now provides me with the same kind of excitement I was getting from Digg at the beginning. It might be that Digg has overextended its community reach. It might be that we’ve all discovered no one has a real chance to submit a story that will make it to the top. I’m not sure. I still enjoy looking at upcoming stories though (especially the Hot upcoming stories).
I think Kevin’s right in his comment that people should look for other Digg users with similar interests for interesting stories. However, the site could be better at enabling that.
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[...] As Scott Karp (who writes about the recent Digg move here) says in a recent post, companies like Digg live by the community and die by the community. Steve O’Hear at ZDNet has some thoughts about the Digg move, and Josh Bokardo thinks Digg may be in for a surprise. Steve Rubel thinks Digg needs to start paying Diggers or it may be doomed. Mark Evans has a take on the recent move too. And there actually seems to be some support for the idea of removing the top Diggers list on the Digg site itself. Technorati Tags: Digg, game, social networks, Web2.0 [...]