Digg Users Try to Take Over the Asylum, Take Two

Every news feed that I read this week has been filled with stories about the latest Digg revolt. But it was the New York Times' coverage that first grabbed my attention with their opening line "The volatile users at social news ranking site Digg.com Thursday launched a new revolt against the site."

I rarely use Digg. I'll often lend support to an article that I think deserves the attention, but as far as reading news? I don't even bother. And the reason I don't generally use the site is exactly what the Powers That Be are trying to combat: Digg is, at its core, nothing more than an online game. The top Digg submitters acknowledged that in their letter to founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson when they said

"Digg is, in part, a game. It always has been – and that is one of the reasons we love it. Unfortunately the rules to the game have never been under the community's full control. The latest change in the algorithm, along with rumors of secret editors, auto-buries, etc., have led us to believe it is time to break ties with Digg.com."

The mistake that any user of a Web 2.0 site makes is that contributing content should somehow make them part of the decision-making process. A site's owners have to think about the bottom line as well as how to grow their audience, and honestly, I don't think that the previous Digg system was going to help with that.

The current cabal of top submitters controls virtually ALL content that makes it to the front page of Digg. To them, that signifies importance, but it actually signifies Groupthink. If a story doesn't meet the qualifications that the top submitters think are important, there is no chance for the story to receive the eyes that a front-page Digg usually receives.

The changes to the algorithm were an attempt to make the site more balanced. Unless the site is all about egoboo (which, apparently, it is in the minds of the top submitters), it shouldn't have mattered. The top Digg submitters can still submit the content that they want, but more people would have a voice in what stories deserve attention. Someone has to explain how this is a bad thing for ANYONE other than the top submitters, who no longer have sole control of the content that makes the front page.

If Digg wants to be taken seriously, changes like this have to be viewed as something that makes the site better. But if all the top submitters want is to play a game, then they are correct when they say there are lots of other options out there. Like WoW.