Changes at Digg

Digg, the news site where user votes determine what’s on the front page, has changed the algorithms that determine how stories are ranked in an effort to keep people from gaming the system. This has caused quite a bit of turmoil among its users, as Daily Blog Tips and the CNET News Blog (and many others) note. From CNET:

The update effectively punishes people who vote in groups to promote certain stories. The result of the update is that stories that reach the homepage will need to be “dugg” by a diverse group of people.

“Digg’s promotional algorithm ensures that the most popular content dugg by a diverse, unique group of diggers reaches the home page,” Digg founder Kevin Rose said in a blog. “Our goal is to give each person a fair chance of getting their submission promoted to the home page.”

I’ve written before about how gaming of Digg is inevitable. One of the more pernicious social media/Web 2.0 ideas is that popularity trumps expertise; thus, as I write, many of the top world news stories for the past week on Digg are about Scientology. These may be interesting stories, but are they the most significant stories of the week? If you need a quick update on what’s happening on the world, will Digg provide it for you?

No. A human editor with deep knowledge and experience can, however. That doesn’t mean that the people filling that role in the news industry are doing a good job - in fact, I’d say that they are generally not - but the idea that something like Digg will do better is a bit silly.

Digg is fun to browse, as long as you don’t take it too seriously. It’s a sideshow, not a revolution. And because it’s a popular, traffic-generating sideshow, expect to see more algorithm-tinkering in an attempt to keep the system relatively honest, just as search engine algorithms change to defeat people gaming that system and spam filters are tweaked to block people gaming those systems.

---

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.

The Opinionated Marketers | Powered by WordPress | ElegantBlue is a custom theme by Nathan Rice