Digg: Editor’s Playground

April 20th, 2006

Forever Geek says that Digg is an editors playground. They pointed to two articles which seem to have made it to the front page where the first 19 diggers were identical.

They also say that rather than being a real democracy, moderators seem to be determining whether articles are suitable. Forever Geek's article was posted and removed from Digg and the person who posted it was banned for "misuse". Forever Geek also got banned from Digg.

They conclude:

"Digg as an idea is fantastic. As a system of disseminating news without having to wait for editors it is amazing. But it seems to be suffering from a power complex. The two articles we originally mentioned were obviously promoted to the front page in an artificial manager.. Our website getting banned was obviously in retaliation to our story. Their entire philosophy now feels shallow and false - the editors decidedly put those two articles to the front page, just like they decidedly removed us from their system. Users may have originally driven the website, but it looks like that ideal is nothing more than a nice idea in the past."

BoingBoing asked the founder of Fark.com on his views. He talks about how Fark implemented a Digg-like social voting system but how it didn't work out in the long run:

"We had to disable the feature because the funniest ones weren't getting picked.

Social engineering self-selects the least-offensive crap right to the top. It's a great idea but it doesn't scale."

Certainly the digg for friends issue exists. People I know over MSN Messenger often ask me to digg their articles and I have no problem doing that. And yes, I've asked people to digg my submissions before.

I've been getting my news from Slashdot recently because I've found it to be a lot higher quality. The links are more on topic, the slashdot articles are of a higher quality (less typos, links through personal blog, etc.) Perhaps popularity is killing Digg.

Hopefully Digg can resolve these issues and get back to it's glory days.