Digg Problems

September 7th, 2006

Techcrunch is musing on the recent problems at Digg, namely the recent accusation that there are groups of people who “band together” and automatically digg each other’s stories, thereby increasing said story’s chance of making it to the front page. And I thought the big Digg news was that Kevin Rose finally got to hang out with Lala at the Tiki Bar.

Anyhow, as far as I see it, there are two solutions, and I think Digg is taking the easier, safer track. Basically, adjust the magic Digg algorithms and somehow make people digging stories submitted by their friends less worthy, which I personally think defeats the whole purpose of digg. Why would you not want to digg a friend’s story? The whole reason why they are a “friend” is likely because you have similar interests. Is the implication that people should not be friends?

The second problem with this approach is this leads to an arm’s war; Digg tweaks its methods, the “cabals” see it as a challenge and figure out a way to get around the method, Digg tweaks its methods, repeat.

The real, honest solution, and the harder one, is that Digg needs more users. It also needs to somehow convince those users to submit more stories and actively participate in the digging process. I’d like to see some stats as to how many users are actually logging in and digging the recently submitted stories. It’s obvious the vast majority are just looking at the front page, clicking a few articles, and leaving, thereby giving each vote by the cabal more weight. In that sense, the community is getting what it puts in, leading to the old adage: If you don’t vote, you can’t complain. The honest way to beat the assumed Digg cabals is for more people to get involved and eventually they will outnumber any group.

The latter task is inherently more difficult, and seems to be the next challenge for Web 2.0: how do you build and foster a positive community where everyone feels they can contribute, be heard, and get something out of it in the end? It’s a question that probably doesn’t have a technological solution, and one that even our own government doesn’t have totally figured out. But it’s a worthy challenge to be faced with.

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