Digging Deep
The tech news and social networking site Digg.com has been under the microscope for the past couple of days. For those who aren’t aware, Digg is considered to be a revolutionary model for news reporting in that the site has no editors, per se. The people who run Digg don’t decide which stories appear on the front page of the site. Instead, readers are encouraged to “digg” (sort of like giving a thumbs-up) the user-submitted links to stories they like. The prominence and position of the various news items on the site change depending on how popular they are among the readers.
Digg’s model is completely user-driven. The editors are just there to make sure that nothing gets abused. Of course, any open system such as Digg’s is vulnerable to exploitation. On Wednesday of this week (the 19th), a post went up at ForeverGeek.com suggesting voting fraud and the possible corruption of the Digg.com story ranking structure. The author, Macgyver, wrote a follow-up post the very next day. Macgyver’s two posts from ForeverGeek set off a lively debate over whether or not the editors and prominent users in the Digg community are abusing the system by pushing their favorite stories to the top and blocking the URLs of certain blogs without reason or warning.
While Digg is free to run their site however they see fit, many users are upset that Digg may not be what it claims to be — an openly democratic system.
The debate rages even more vigorously today. Digg founder Kevin Rose has posted his own response to the accusations. Macgyver at ForeverGeek has responded to Kevin’s response. Then there’s this excellent piece on Blogcritics written by Phillip Winn. The Inquirer has a piece. There’s even a podcast about the controversy.
So who’s to blame? It is evident that Digg’s user-driven system is flawed since it’s too easy to exploit the rules and manipulate the voting. I’m not an expert in ranking algorithms or in social networking site structures, so I’ll leave the deep analysis to the pros. However, I don’t know if the manipulation is necessarily Digg’s fault or not. The site may have simply gotten too large for its own health, the pool of users becoming polluted with reactionary subjects of mob rule. Growing pains, if you will. Blogcritics’ Winn suggests that Digg needs to add transparency to their submission and ranking procedures, and I agree with that.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on how Digg handles these criticisms. And we’re sure we’re not the only ones.
