This week there’s been turmoil in the Digg world, as the Digg developers strive to reduce the influence of the top users – in other words make the system fairer. As Kevin Rose recently wrote, their aim is that “a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy”.
However this has caused an uproar amongst Digg’s top users, who feel they have been accused of gaming. Apparently most of Digg’s top 20-30 users have refused to contribute or digg stories since the uproar happened. Or if they have dugg stories, they’ve been buried by other users – check out this short thread for an example.
This is a serious upheaval amongst the Digg community – and it’s begun to affect the discussions. In this digg thread, a top digger named Digital Gopher gets a very hard time:
And see this recent Digg thread entitled Top Digg Users Removing Avatars Hired by Netscape, which links to http://americanhistory.about.com/od/traitors/. Heavy stuff.
I’m told that the (non-public) forum for the top users is a very heated place right now!
Stats suggest quality has improved?
DuggTrends, a digg stats website which has been tracking the results of the Digg user revolt, suggests that quality has actually improved as a result:
“Concluding, we can infer that Digg’s front page promotion algorithm has changed to bring quality to the users. It maintains a balance between quality and quantity. This might make things not so easy for a story to get promoted to the front page, this has been raised by top users some 30 days back “ is DiggTM punishing most popular users” and now it is being raised by rest of the users but this improved the quality of stories promoting to front page. The new proposal of assigning weights depending on the diversity of digging and various other factors should bring balance to the whole system and we sincerely look forward for all the users work together to provide valuable content through DiggTM.”
DuggTrends graph showing drop in front page stories
If it is true that frontpage quality has increased, then it looks like Digg’s upgrades are working – and the system is fairer. Personally I don’t think the top diggers were at fault in all this, it’s just that the Digg system did unfairly give too much power to the top diggers. That has apparently now been fixed.
Now the big question is: can the relationships – between Digg, the top users, and other digg users – be fixed too?
UPDATE: DuggTrends has updated their post: “We are not hinting that the drop is due to any algorithm changes on 7/09/06 but it is because of the lack of top users activity on digg. Regarding the “quality changes” we were refering to the algorithm updates done in between 20/7 and 27/07.”
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)