So, once you start “digging” (I’m sorry — I couldn’t help it) into Digg as a controversy, you start finding some very smart people debating Digg as a vast experiment in social networks, human behaviour, and gaming theory.

What rises to the top is a very concerning assertion that shakes the foundation of the web2.0 that drives user-driven content sites such as Digg.

When people are organized or self organize into groups, can they make choices independently or will confounding factors influence those choices — to the point where “the wisdom of crowds” becomes nothing more than a fallacious pie-in-the-sky dream?

Digg, for a variety of reasons, actively promotes factors which influence these choices.

And, in its defence, its fun.

• Its fun to have “friends”.
• Its fun to see what your friends find interesting.
• And its fun to support what your friends do.
• Its also fun to see what everyone else finds interesting … and that’s really the point of Digg, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, all of these factors confound your choices to the stories you might find interesting and promote in and of itself. Now, there are much better individuals than I at analyzing this phenomena, but I think its worth raising.

Is the system that Digg has created fundamentally supports an impossible idea? Is it really the rule of mob, rather than the wisdom of crowds? Is it really possible to create a true ‘democracy’ of news when the system introduces so much bias?

And if it is — is it right to promote it as such?

RESOURCES for your perusal:

Shmula: Digg as as Game — quite possibly the most intelligent article I’ve read about explaining how Digg works on a theoretical and humanistic level. Also, offers quite possibly the fairest solution I’ve also heard (before) — make it impossible to see who votes for what, and remove the fact that different users have different ‘voting strengths’.

Google Blogoscoped: Digg vs. Groupthink — on the idea of GroupThink, and how it affects all systems of people; it gives a nice breakdown of questions perhaps you should be thinking about the next time you’re concerned about its affect on a population of people

Alex Bosworth: Digg as a Prisoner’s Dilemma — how the friends system might mimic the Prisoner’s Dilemma, whereby it might make sense to trust your “friends” and vote with them, perhaps encouraging the controversy that exploded yesterday; tip: chrisek’s blog alerted me to this post, which got me thinking about the whole story.

Rashi Sinha: Digg and the Wisdom of Crowds — breaking down the four fundamental tenets of the “wisdom of crowds” and how it (doesn’t) apply to Digg.

RusselBeattie: Blog Sensationalism — How the phenomena of crowds at Digg promote something like a shouting match between diggers, with bottom-denominator stories, who he regards as sensationalistic, as floating to the top.

SourceLab: Dynamics of Digg — Alex Bosworth breaks down how the different stakeholders in Digg interact with each other necessarily to allow stories to get published, found, and promoted — and whats in it for them to do so.

Shirky: A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy — Clay Shirkey’s keynote speech at Social Software at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003. Mr. Shirkey breaks it down in a lightly edited version of his speech — a truly thoughtful discussion about how a group is its own enemy; why its important “now”; what you need to accept about the situation; how you can plan and design for groups as they participate.