I’ve been formulating a post for weeks on why Digg.com is a piece of garbage. I’ve had numerous experiences where Digg had some lame political post on there (and by lame, I mean any political post; Digg is a tech site, not a politics site) and it got hundreds of Diggs from idiot users who don’t understand what the site is actually (or should I say what it’s supposed to be) about.

Forevergeek.com calls them out for their ineptitude and their selective editing and such and even smacks around Kevin Rose (who, don’t get me wrong, I admire; I just don’t like Digg) a bit for what they perceive as a bit of “editing” in what’s supposed to be a user edited, produced, and contributed forum.

I hate to repeat so much of another blog’s post, but I do think this warrants some important scrutiny by anyone out there who thinks Digg.com is an important news source and filtering system:

A few days ago I noticed about how SpitF1re had two articles on the front page. I opened up the comments in new tabs, and when at the end noticed that the digg order was the exact same. I also noticed that Kevin Rose had dugg both (and in perfect order). So I dutifully trotted on over to this blog here and posted about it. I never submitted the article to Digg (bashing Digg on Digg?)

I believe Technorati said that between 1-3 blogs picked it up. One of them was Binary Bonsai. Reading its comments, I saw that Andreas had tried posting it and found out that ForeverGeek had been banned. My name is Jacob Gower. His name is Andreas Climent. We are most definitely not the same people
Further perusing my logs, I found that a forum post on Google Blogoscoped also backed up what Andreas had said. ForeverGeek was banned.

What made this odd was that FG has hit the frontpage numerous times, including just a few weeks ago. We are a fairly popular blog, top 3k according to Technorati, and over 3000+ readers according to FeedBurner. Why else could we have been banned except for our post on the Digg Army?

So I gathered all the evidence and put it into a post: Digg’s founder was involved in this automated promotion system (all the diggs in a row, a comment about how it was on the front page and no comments, etc), ForeverGeek was banned for noting it, and Digg was no longer truly a social network system (as obvious editorial control had come into play).

The post spread damn fast. It hit Reddit, it hit Memeorandum, it got several members banned from Digg (most notably how Splasho got knocked out), and in general was making Digg look bad.

Things got interesting when manchild posted on the first comment of a frontpage article and really brought this issue to attention. As of my writing this, his comment has +96 diggs.

So what happened? Digg had the beginnings of a PR mess. They had obviously rigged the system, had been trying to silence what we had raised, except that the issue was beyond their control. Even two of my friends got banned trying to submit the post (they tried to be sneaky by using a redirect … that idea failed).

So a few hours later, suddenly we have this: Digg Corrupted.

Looking at the front page, a 7 hour 25 minute old post with 48 diggs is on the front page. As of right now, that article has 50 diggs in 52 minutes and is not promoted.

So what is going? Easy.

Digg got busted. And now they are performing their public relations part to make it look okay. It got busted for using editorial control to force promote pages. It got busted for removing ForeverGeek (even though obviously users wanted it spread). And after the story started to spread, it tried to act like nothing happened by unbanning ForeverGeek).

One last thing people keep forgetting: The diggs were all in order. Sure friends digg other friends’ stories - but 16 in a row identical to both articles? Yeah, I’m not buying it. Color me unimpressed - the original idea of Digg is dead. The apologists are out in force, but social-driven it ain’t.

Normally, editorial control not being in the hands of users isn’t a big deal. However, Digg’s supposed best feature is social collaboration.

Horsecrap. It’s also its downfall.

Digg has a few really glaring problems, and unless the team over there gets their act together and fixes them, Digg is destined to become a colossal nothing:

1. Something has to be done about off-topic crap. Digg.com is for tech news. Period. The constant barrage of non-tech-related stuff that gets digg’ed by users is destroying the site. Social editing is supposed to fix this problem, but instead it’s exacerbating it profoundly. People are digging stories that fit their agendas, and in turn ignoring the premise and purpose of digg.

2. Something has to be done about the swarm mentality that requires fierce loyalty to Digg.com. If you dare criticize Digg.com for anything, your comments get minused immediately and by a lot of people. So much for all that open dialogue.

3. Something needs to be done about the “front page” system. As the story above notes (and it’s in the original story on Forevergeek.com, not the excerpt I posted), there’s no logic behind what does and doesn’t make it to the front page. Stories with fewer diggs are making it there while stories that people are truly connecting with are not showing up there even after exponentially more diggs.

4. The wild-wild west nature of digg is a utopian concept, but in reality, it’s severely broken because, as many have noted, the masses are asses. Someone needs to provide basic structure and let everything else fall out however it wants (for direction on this, see flickr, a perfect example of a social app that doesn’t fall apart because the people who run it don’t let it).

Digg.com is a great concept, and one that’s bound to be imitated ad nauseum as more and more companies try to cash in on the model. Once the field is diluted, Digg will be irrelevant unless it grows up beforehand.

Somehow, I don’t see that happening, and I Digg will be just another web app that failed.

Technorati Tags: digg.com, digg, forevergeek.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Interesting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.