Deep Jive Interests

So, I also noticed the bogus story on Digg, allegedly attributed to Reuters, last night about the PlayStation 3 supposedly recalling over 650,000 units because of a fatal error in its video processing processor-type-thing — and how idiotic I felt over calling my wife to read it to only realize it was a fake.

What was quite surprising, or not, as it were, is that i reached the front page of Digg last night, still accumulating over a hundred votes the last time I saw it.

No surprise that this morning there is neither hide nor hair of the story or the comments.

Its just the latest example of the Digg editors doing what they do best — stomping out inappropriate posts and spam as they see fit.  Which is totally fine, I guess — except that it doesn’t jive with what Digg says it does.  Provide complete editorial control to their users.

Digg works because a large group of people actively digg (promote) good stories and report (remove bad stories). Since digg’s content is user-driven, it is up to YOU to contribute.

That is, rather than let the user base report this “bad” story, it decided to exercise editorial control and obliterate it.  How can you tell?  “Buried” stories because that are marked “duplicates”, “lame” or what have you are still able to be found through the search.

Is it the first time its happened?  Of course not.

Consider “Aliwood”, where a few months ago, the Diggnation got ‘tricked’ into voting up a page for reasons other than its intrinsic newsworthiness.  A college student basically mentioned that she was getting graded on her ability to post articles and get them “dugg”; as a result, the first few articles she submitted, although stale, got hundreds, and in one case, over 1000 diggs not because they were fresh and interesting — but because of the story around her.  What may or may not have helped is that she was also not unattractive.  In a demographic composed almost entirely of males, this may have also pumped up the number of diggs.

Since none of her stories were getting buried fast enough, what does Digg do?  Allow the users to police their own content as advertised?  You guessed it — no.  In about 72h they obliterated every trace of her submissions AND even her account.  Nothing was left.

I suppose all the heavy handededness falls under the guise of “spam control”, but in that case, its still editorial control.

What I don’t understand is why Digg doesn’t just say “hey, we have editors just like Netscape” and be done with it?  Why put up the charade of being totally user driven?

One would hate to think it were a marketing ploy to deliberately leading its users to thinking they were in control.

And its equally distasteful to think that they’re just doing it to avoid going “The Netscape route”, which perhaps some up and ups would view as a failure.

On the other hand, if you’re a jaded conspiracy theorist, you might just ascribe to those lines … especially if you’re familiar with the hijinks and shennanigans that have gone out this year alone.