So, it looks like Digg secured a little more funding in spite of accusations of gaming. In fact, Jay Adelson goes on record in the comments section of venture beat, saying that he trusts the systems and community in place, and gaming to his knowledge, hasn’t yet happened.
It got me thinking on a wider question, because in my opinion, there are plenty of things that are wrong with Digg, but Digg keeps on growing. Even if gaming was rampant, would Jay admit it? And even if it was (and I’m convinced it is to the extend that no one has yet picked up on it, or its gotten publicity) would it matter? In fact, in spite of all of its problems and recent negative publicity in the blogosphere, what could possibly dethrone Digg at all?
I think the majority of users do not care one whit about the drama that I’ve blogged about; its quite possible that out of its potential membership, only a tiny percentage of people actually register, comment, and even submit articles. Personally, I had used Digg for quite a while before I registered; for example, I’ve been reading stuff on Digg since Dec’04, in fact, but only registered this past summer.
Most, I think, are happy to use it to just find stuff that’s interesting to read.
And because of that reason, all of the internal corruption in the world probably won’t matter one bit with regards to “stopping” Digg; beyond having the “momentum” of over half a million registered users, dominating an expanding category of news / social sites (social bookmarking), and just continuing to grow, I’m not sure that even if clear evidence of “gaming” were to hit the mainstream news it would matter – to the point where it would be unsavory for potential suitors, or further funding.
So what would? At this point, I think only a couple of things could derail Digg:
1) Digg self destructing. If there were to be a consistent and a dramatic change in the kind of content showing up to the front page resulting from a drastic change in Digg’s editorial push. For example, if the majority of stories ended up being political, or videos about car explosions, or suddenly all about celebrity obssesssions, then it Digg could loser viewers very quickly. Could a population of individuals game Digg to lead to this kind of deliberate change in Digg’s content? Maybe.
But unless there was to be an “editorial” change with respect to the kind of content they’d allow, I suspect that even with the moderators it has now (all two or more of them), that any change would be transient at best. No, a consistent change in the content would have to come from on high, and the chance that would ever change is marginal at best.2) News aggregators becoming irrelevant. The only other situation would be if user-found news were to suddenly found to be irrelevant. Again, it seems like the entire category of algorithmically derived news — news from news aggregators, news found by people, news found by aggregators AND people — is actually growing, so this seems unlikely as well. Even if Google DID jump into the fray with Google Reader organized links, I don’t think this would cause Digg to become irrelevant, only grow less fast. In fact, Google’s effort would only grow the category, and it would probably fare like its other offerings. Not dominate the category its coming late to (gmail into email), but offer a legitimate number two.
What does this all mean?
Does it mean that Digg’s competitors don’t have a chance? Well, it means that like any industry, there is probably room for a number two, but its unlikely that Digg will be unseated at number one.
Will this mean I’ll STOP blogging about what’s wrong at Digg? No. I think its always worthwhile pointing out the lack of checks and balances in the biggest news aggregators / social bookmarkers on the planet.
But I do think that Digg is pretty much unstoppable at the moment. Much to my chagrin, all the things that we perceive don’t work about it, or aren’t equitable about it, don’t really YET matter to the people that matter: the majority of people who use Digg, and the future investors for Digg.
14 Comments
…would it matter?
Actually the answer is in the Venture Beat article.
You, I and many others who look critically at what is actually going on with digg, are the tech kids, once also called the nerds (no offense meant). Many of those tech kids help platforms grow, but most of times leave those platforms when the
sheepmain stream users arrive.If today, after only some months already, non-tech news have become more popular than the tech news, this tells us much about the critical attitude of the majority of the Digg users.
Not that far from old media anymore. People will still go to 1&1 because the most popular PC magazines are spammed with 1&1 ads.
Digg is popular and with broadband (finally) reaching more and more homes Digg will get even more popular.
Like I said in a comment not that long ago… time for something after Digg.
Digg may have a long run as the top venue for competitive social-bookmarking behavior; this appears to be more attractive to males than females and those older than 15 and younger than 25.
However, if you define the market to include all those internet-using individuals who wish to have things of interest brought to their attention, it seems to me Digg is just one point of departure for a confluence of attention-aggregation and reputation-recommendation streams including — off the top of my head, StumbleUpon, WizAg, Touchstone, and Lijit.
I suspect they will converge on systems where the signal/noise ratio for any given individual — who does not derive utility from the actual act of socialbookmarking and the ancillary acts of commenting, burying, etc. — is enhanced.
I agree with what Ben wrote:
“I suspect they will converge on systems where the signal/noise ratio for any given individual — who does not derive utility from the actual act of socialbookmarking and the ancillary acts of commenting, burying, etc. — is enhanced.”
Digg is all about the >99% of people reading what
Ben — that’s an excellent point; I agree that news / content aggregators like Digg tend to be quite vertically oriented with particular niches.
Having said that, Digg is almost big enough to start getting MSM coverage for how big it is. Since they have actively branched out into other areas other than tech / geek information (and therefore have nascent communities in these areas), I think Digg is one ‘large’ news cycle away from exploding even further.
That is, if Digg were to get covered in one or more magazines for something newsworthy, say, if it were to get acquired, then that could spark a more general usage as non geeks get interested.
Cheers
t
Could get there, I admit. But I think they will have to address the issue of the bury button. As F. Stutzman and M. Saleem have pointed out. That option gives disproportionate power to cliques.
Imagine if the del.icio.us links were subject to cliques who could effectively hide from view information with which they disagreed. All the believers in crystals and harmonic healing vibrations etc. having the power to bury links to New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet.
I completely agree that the “bury” function is broken — and there’s no question Muhammad knows what he’s talking about.
[On the other hand, I would also like to think that I've contributed to some thought about the "bury" button as well ;) http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2006/12/21/diggs-20-spam-fighting-getting-reputable-domains-banned/ ]
Ah, but in the groves of academe, they have been pondering this for…weeks…now
http://chimprawk.blogspot.com/2006/12/diggs-lack-of-symmetry.html
At the risk of making this sound like a pissing match (which this clearly is, and I am clearly this pisser by writing this vain comment), John Chow noticed it a few weeks before hand, and of course I added my 3.5c at the time. ;)
http://www.deepjiveinterests.com/2006/11/26/john-chow-confirms-mobs-rule-at-digg/
LOL. Where it the bury button when I clearly need it so badly now? (Just in case, for future reference and possible namecalling, do you use a Windows machine and thereby cede all credibility ex ante? If you use a Linux box, you can ignore this question.) Anyway, keep up the great work.
Yes, I do use a windows machine — the credibility is something I’m trying to earn every day; and to that end, this had better be the last pissing match on my behalf. ;)
have a good one, ben :D
Didn’t realize at the time but the “less than” character seemed to have cut out pretty much my whole comment (and trust me — it was important ;-). I meant to say something like this:
Digg is all about 99% of the users reading what less than 1% of the users determine, through active participation. This is the standard “participation inequality” effect. Yes, it can be entertaining to read nonetheless, but those people aren’t like me. They’re aggregating news for the masses based on THEIR personal bias, but not on MY personal bias (interests, behaviors, context, intent, etc.).
I think some new form of personalized news may be a threat to Digg in 2007. It won’t be about “aggregation” but rather about “congregation”, where I can choose my cliques very precisely based on shared interests/behaviors. Evolving further, we will see the congregation model almost reverse participation inequaltiy, where passive activity equals participation.
A better social news site that consistently delivers higher quality content could cause a mass exodus of Digg users. Reddit is getting there, but not quite. Netscape tried and failed. But once something that delivers, by whatever mechanism, democratic or not, a consistently higher quality of stories, Digg will deflate just as quickly as it inflated.
If I were Kevin Rose, I would take the $60 million and sell out right now, quit while you’re ahead. Digg isn’t innovating fast enough to stay on top forever.
I doubt that a better product would cause a mass exodus because I’m not sure something dramatically better could be built; while the Digg mechanism is surely flawed, it is not the content that necessarily suffers all the time either, no matter what people have been braying about (including me).
Also, it is not a zero sum game. Perhaps better systems exist already; techmeme and megite are excellent methods of trawling for prominent news in tech topics, for example, and people can use them AND digg.
No, I think that in order for Digg to fail, you could not just find something “better”, but something inside digg would have to catastrophically fail, or there be a seismic shift in how people view news. Since I don’t see either happening, Digg is going to remain around for a long time.
I just started using Digg, and definitely am not as educated on the subject as everyone commenting here, but would love to know what, specifically, everyone here thinks could be the potential ‘gaming’ of the system?