Digg, one of the more interesting social news start-ups is changing its stripes. Kevin Rose, the hipster co-founder of the San Francisco-based company announced some changes in the way Digg does its digging, which may or may not go-down well with the larger Digg Nation.
“After considerable internal debate and discussion with many of those who make up the Top Digger list, we’ve decided to remove the list beginning tomorrow,” he writes. The cause of this change – some blatant attempts to game the Digg system, like this one. While their motives are pure, Digg team is taking a huge risk of alienating the same users who spend countless hours finding and digging stories. What do you think about these changes?
Well I am writing my new article titled:
“Top 10 Tips on How-To survive the New Digg System and get Payola in 2007” 🙂 lol
-Dal
P.S. Honestly I think this is a good change but we will see in the coming days.
You’re right… it’s a bold move, but it’s a good move. Digg’s profile has grown so large that it’s become a bit dangerous to expose the balance power in its entirety.
Here’s the great truth about Digg that Kevin and Jay are too smart to say in public: their contributor base is so ample and active that you could literally delete the accounts of the top 50 Diggers and the site wouldn’t miss a beat. Someone else will submit that great new X-Box hack 3 minutes after user #32 would have. It’s a testament to how resilient the system really is… it can withstand the loss of one or many contributors.
Meanwhile, Kevin and Jay have tried to do the right thing over the last several months and “spread the power” out a bit, only to be met with criticism from the “top” users. So what’s a Digg exec to do? The smartest move may be to do exactly what they’ve decided to do: get rid of the concept of “top diggers”, at least in a public sense. If no one knows where they stand on the overall “leaderboard”, they won’t feel too powerful for being so high or too powerless for being so low. As Kevin said in his post, the leaderboard served a positive purpose when Digg was at a certain size… but now, it probably does more harm than good.
I can understand why it’s a smart but very bold move for Digg because it will surely upset some of the most active users, a group that you don’t usually want to upset. Most of the times, you try to cater and build that group. This change really appeals to the more casual diggers.
But I don’t see it changing the way digg functions as it will continue to be interesting and people will always try to game the system in in terms of getting certain stories to the front page.
Definitely a step in the right direction.
That’s tricky. 2/3 of people who voted don’t believe that the top digg list is a major incentive… I think I agree, I have submit articles to digg and I never even check the list… but I would like to know what people believe are the true motives? For me, I think it was just curiosity, how many votes could I get. But obviously the novelty wears off pretty quick.
Actually, scaring off their top diggers may be a great idea. You have a small group of editors who happen to have WAY too much time on their hands deciding what other people read. I’d much rather have a more democratic approach and see more folks digging fewer articles each.
The trick will be getting folks to look at the “unpromoted” articles. In any event, Jay and Kevin are smart cookies and have some deep insight into what makes their creation tick.