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DiggAin't democracy a bitch? Digg Inc. is taking it on the chin Thursday after announcing yesterday that it would change its algorithm for regulating which stories are most highly ranked and appear on its home page. The commendable goal -- stopping certain users of the social news service from effectively controlling the headlines by organizing group voting campaigns for given stories -- is harnessed to an even more salutary principle: diversity.
What has some bloggers up in arms is that such changes appear to undermine, or at least conflict with, Digg's governing editorial philosophy: letting you, me and the rest of the great unwashed decide what news is important. Fair enough. Digg toots the populist horn pretty hard in its marketing material, saying on the company's Web site that users "won't find editors" doing, like, whatever grody things editors do. So it's no wonder that some people get upset when they hear Digg CEO Kevin Rose talk about ensuring the diversity of Digg's content by "making tweaks" to its code. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
Thing is, despite Digg's rhetoric, the wizard has been plainly visible for some time. What did people think, that some magical algorithm (whatever that is) was going to produce a perfect, empoweringly transparent (whatever that means) democracy on Digg? The sort of democracy, as our politics have shown us repeatedly in recent years, that is wholly unavailable in the offline world? The great fiction about Digg is that the company is, as it claims, "changing the way people consume information online." It's also the great truth. Digg and its ilk really have altered, among other things, how media companies (like mine) decide what readers see.
But democracy, whether enacted with a mouse click or at the ballot box, is a notoriously messy process. What Digg users are encountering now is the competing pull of interests between government -- the company's management and its investors -- and the governed. Of course, Digg's community can't throw Rose out of office. But they can swing their votes to Reddit, Thoof or any of the other clones out there "democratizing" the news.
Power to the posters. - Alain Sherter
See Jan. 23 post from Kevin Rose on Digg's blog
For more see VentureBeat, Revoltnation, Valleywag, ParisLemon, P2P Foundation and TechCrunch
To me this seems identical to the transition Google went through. Initially PageRank was a very clever heuristic for figuring out a page's topical relevance as defined by inbound links to that page.
What happened next was a flurry of system-gaming by "link farms" and the like, who stuffed the democratic ballot box with excessive votes (links).
The same thing is now happening with digg. what they're proposing to do in terms of "diversity" of opinion to ascertain trustworthiness of votes feels like what Google has done to try to ensure the trustworthiness of links.
Given that both are massive sorting functions it isn't a surprising development to me.
Alex--Agreed that maintaining a community, and building a business around one, is a high-wire act. Strictly an opinion here, but I also suspect that Digg's users may feel less allegiance to the company than, say, a Facebook or Google user does to those companies. Social news services are a more informal network than SNs, and just practically speaking it's easier to disentangle yourself from Digg and switch to a competitor than to hop from MySpace to Bebo.
Scott--That makes sense to me, but seems to me that Digg's position as a business is significantly nore precarious than Google's was in during earlier iterations. The perception was that Google was technology superior (and arguably it was); not sure the same perception exists about Digg. That said, I think its efforts to equalize voting is probably better for the long-term utility (and integrity, perhaps) of its service.
Thanks for reading.
Alain,
Editor
Tech Confidential
Socially recommended content will forever fight this battle. A community can continue to improve and provide ever more relevant content, but only to that community. To diversify weakens the community. Even more broad social sites like Reddit rely on a close overlap with "similar" users for consistent quality.
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