Is Digg dug?
I’ve been wary of Digg for a while. While I do enjoy using it to track what’s happening on the Interwebs, the comments have become so overwhelmingly troll-ridden that I can’t even stand participating in discussions. They’re supposed to be a “user-driven” site, but now the Internet-at-large is beginning to wonder just what role the editors of the site really do have. Allow me to point you to an article at ForeverGeek, which lays out some interesting theories about how things make it to the front page, and how other stories are almost instantly banned:
What really caught my eye with the situation was the sequence of diggs. On the bottom it notes who has dugg an article, and it lists them in order. Confounding as it was, the two beforementioned stories had the same sixteen people digg the story in a row. So the 7th digger of one article (Insomn1a) was the 7th digger of the other article. In fact, removing bribera’s digg of one article showed that the first nineteen diggs of each article were identical. What made this really interesting was that the 17th digger was none other than Kevin Rose, aka celebrated creator and founder of Digg. I’ve read that Digg gets anywhere from 500,000 to 800,000 readers a day. 16 (or 19) identical diggs for two articles by the same author? 22 of the first 24 diggers being being the same for both articles? Somehow I don’t think that is a coincidence.
There is a tinge of “conspiracy-theory” here, but I’m prepared to put on my tintoil hat. The evidence does not look good for Digg. The site has a great idea going for it, and I sure hope that it doesn’t have dubious means for pumping up links to the front page, or for killing entires that dare question their practices.
Related:
Dig on Digg on the BOL forums.
Digg corrupted? Forever Geek makes the case from Guardian Unlimited
Digging up dirt from Ryan’s blog
No related posts.
Hmm, this article is interesting and the evidence is compelling. I’m inclined to agree with you here because of the nature of the identical Diggs. It really would be a tragedy if this was the case – and this argument seems to show that it really could be the case.
I used to use Digg a lot, however I read Slashdot more often because some of the stuff that gets onto Digg is bizarre. Still, I do see a lot of great stuff at Digg.com, but not as much at Boing Boing or Slashdot which don’t get as much coverage.
The most worrying is the procedure of “killing entires that dare question their practices.” That’s very bad news for Digg, hopefully Kevin speaks out soon.