Discoverers/Submitters | Editors/Selectors | |
Old Media | elite domain experts | elite domain(?) experts |
Digg Model | small group of hyperactive elite | crowd + underground manipulation groups |
Recommended Model | crowd | elite domain experts |
"If 30 or 20 or 50 or 90 people want to digg each other's stories, let them," Chrisek, a Digg user in the site's top 60, said via e-mail. "I digg my friend's stories. I also report my friends' stories as inaccurate or as spam when need be. Am I more prone to digg stories from my friends? Of course."
Jason Calacanis, head of a rival social news service at Netscape.com, scolded Digg for punishing its core contributors. "Frankly I think Digg is tripping over itself here," he wrote on his blog. "The top users earned their spot and they should be rewarded for their contributions -- not penalized. One person, one vote -- that's the rule. You can't change that or you change the fundamental premise of democracy."
I wonder, if digg was better implemented and protected from abuse from the beginning, would it be so popular?
While dig is about taking a consensus and presenting what everyone must/will like based on that consensus, Stumbleupon takes the whims of the users and uses it to attempt to serve, based on the individuals preferences-allen (September 09, 2006, 06:45 AM)
One of the maxims of running a business is as it starts to get traction, folks will notice, and when they notice, they will start to question it. That's happening more and more here at FM...Had the poster done his homework, he'd realize FM has a large (12 and growing) direct salesforce, which is very focused on selling Digg, as well as all of our other sites...
Once power users realize their power to influence the project, they often become its evangelists and actively promote the project by recruiting new members. Promoting such a project means increasing their influence, which is a stong motivating factor. If the system is truly democratic, and hard to abuse, promoting the project only decreases the influence of each individual member. This might explain why truly democratic projects remain relatively small, while projects appealing to democracy, but allowing for abuse, grow very rapidly.
Digg is not, has never been, and most likely will never be a good source of links to the best the web has to offer. It is nothing more than a mirror of the ideas & concepts that are hot in the current pop culture. And that is what it is intended to be. It's all about what is popular without any regards to quality. And many people will vote for stuff based on what they think other people will think if they don't because they think their own views are not popular.
If it were possible to buy 1 share of stock in every company whose goods & services are featured in a link that appears on the front page, each time they make it to the front page, you'd probably become richer than Bill Gates, once you eliminate the links to anything related to Digg, Google, or Linux.
The best stuff never makes it to the front page because it's not hip & trendy. The likelihood of an article about cancer being cured by a small group of unknown scientists living in a small 'boring' country making the front page is much less than one where the headline would be something like "Digg member cures Brittney Spears of warts with the aid of Google and Linux".
Just remember that Average Joe seems pretty happy with Digg so really what you're trying to do is convince people that the "exciting, hip, new "unbiased", people-driven way of finding news" is wrong, and that's hard work.
My Proposal
If Digg were to be relevant again, it must tackle the problems of GroupThink, Conformity, Paradigm Shift and Information Cascades.
To tackle Groupthink, make it truly democratic again — do not profile Top Diggers or elevate anybody higher than anyone else. This includes no special weights on previous digging history, etc. — level playing ground for everyone, no monarchies or philosopher-kings.
To tackle the problem of conformity, do not show profile or # of votes for up-and-coming dugg articles. Just show the article link, with no profiles or votes attached to it. As a compromise, only show the profiles and votes on the articles that make the digg front page, but make them un-diggable from the front page.
Doing the above 2 items will most likely fix the Paradigm Shift and Information Cascade problem.
The idea of a representative voting system for the experts means that users can vote on (or rate) experts in much the same way they currently rate stories has a number of benefits. Voting on experts based on their long term editing choices seems more rational and likely to lead to considered decisions as opposed to instantaneous mass voting based on a glimpse at headline titles.
We have sophisticated anti-gaming processes. We are spending a lot in R & D to prevent gaming. Motivations don’t matter.
After reading the whole post, I still don't know what digg is... did I miss it or am I just naive?-Mizraim (October 04, 2006, 03:07 PM)
Oh. I see. So the idea is to get the ones you want top rated by the small replies:
I agree.
Bump.
Yes.
And so on...-Mizraim (October 04, 2006, 03:12 PM)