There are several stories floating around about how Digg is rigged to give preferential treatment to a small group of users. Digg has a pretty unique way of bringing news to the front page.
“Supporters have touted Digg’s user-driven system as a democratic alternative to mainstream news organizations, which use professional editors in choosing stories and their placement in newspapers and magazines. Since supporters often accuse the editor-based system as subject to personal bias or corruption, the latest brouhaha questions whether Digg is any better.” InformationWeek
am a registered digger, but I have not really looked at the way stories get promoted to the front page. I can see that more diggs gets you there quicker, but it seems that theoretically, it might be possible for a single person to boost their stories a little higher in the rankings. It would take several different user ids and a ton of patience and work, but it seems like it might be possible. Even so, A group of friends could get together and start promoting each other’s stuff, but there would still have to be a ton of planning and cooperation.
The digg model sounds pretty good, but it does get a little weird in there at times. It has a /. (slashdot) kind of feel with less complexity in the scoring metrics. What I mean by weird is that the community of people in general tends to be less forgiving to newbies and they are pretty hard on ultra conservative or ultra liberal comments. I guess that can be a good thing, but it just does not suit my taste for the most part. I am not much of a gray area person. I am much more analytical and often see things black and white. Incidentally, in recent months I have removed both slashdot and digg feeds form my homepage. I really don’t mean any disrespect to slashdot or digg by mentioning that fact about myself. Heck, slashdot is the highest traffic site that I have been able to get one of my stories approved on in the past. I guess I have just turned my focus to other things and do not find news to be that interesting most of the time. My priorities are continuing to change and I find myself spending much less time chasing news stories.
Anyway, you might want to check out the JesusFreak to see the latest analysis on digg’s front page. The URL was as interesting as the story to me. I like it!
