Digg was started by dejected Slashdot readers angry that CmdrTaco didn’t front-page their post about how to make rounded DIV corners in CSS. Founder Kevin Rose created a site that’s based on mob rule: whatever story gets the most votes gets posted the most prominently. In the couple of years since, I’ve been quietly waiting for the site to crumble under its own terrible premise and, perhaps, under the weight of daily rounded DIV corners in CSS stories. Yesterday the crumblage began when Rose started deleting any story that linked to the newly-uncovered secret key that decrypts HD DVDs. (Which is, BTW, 09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0.) The formats backers, sponsors of Digg, were sending out cease-and-desist orders left and right, but Rose was preemptively doing their work for them. That’s when Digg users went into total revolt. When I checked last night, every single story on the front page contained the HD DVD key, which was when Rose shut down new story submissions. Now Rose has cried “uncle,” but Digg has now lost an enormous amount of credibility, with Rose having demonstrated clearly his belief that the site’s users cannot be trusted to also run it. Thing is, he’s right.
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So much for epistemic egalitarianism…
I like Rose’s statement, “fine, you win and I lose, but if digg gets shut down I’m blaming you”.
Classy
I seeee yuoooooo Waaaaldoooo.
I use digg and stumbleupon on a weekly basis, but mainly just for entertainment and distraction, never for news and information.
I think it’s an interesting concept, but I spend most of my time on digg skipping and sifting. And I have been using it less and less lately.
I find myself using Digg less and less lately as well, but I don’t understand your claim that the users can’t run things themselves — are you referring to the community in general, or specifically their reaction to the HD-DVD story?
Regarding the former, I haven’t seen anything problematic lately (and their videos section is still my #1 stop for finding new videos); as for this HD-DVD issue, the users did what they’re supposed to do — post and vote for stories they find interesting. What’s the problem there?
I finally unsubbed from their RSS feed about three weeks ago, and swapped it out for Reddit.
The community in general, yeah. The biggest problem is that it has no institutional memory. Additionally, groups of people are notoriously bad at deciding what’s best for themselves; hence our representative democracy, rather than direct democracy. Digg would work far better with a filtering layer, somebody to say “no, we just had that story last week,” or “nobody’s voted against this story, and only a few have voted for it, but the fact is that it’s really important so I’ll make it visible.”
Heh, I gave my Digg feed the downgrade as well a few weeks ago. I met the Reddit founders when they came by UVa last month (if you didn’t know, they’re both UVa grads), and one of the biggest assets they felt Reddit has is the user base. I knocked them earlier for harping on that, but I dunno — after using the site a lot more over the past few months, the increased quality of discussion at Reddit’s definitely noticeable. But that said, I still don’t think it can be sustained — what stops Reddit from being the next Digg?
I whole-heartedly agree with this, but are you proposing a fix to their algorithms, better human moderation, or is the system just broken at this point (and hence why you left?)
I think it’s broken, but not for a technical reason. There’s no reason why a moderation layer couldn’t be added, but the user base wouldn’t stand for it. The community left is the sort of community that’s willing to tolerate seeing the same story twice a week every week. Digg will no doubt continue to exist for years, but I think its glory days (such as they were) have come and gone.