Well, now you can answer that for yourselves, thanks to some creative piping at Yahoo Pipes.  There’s a mashup that alleges to remove some of the front page results of the Digging Elite (or Top Diggers, or Top X number of Diggers) over here; its been in response to the drama that has surrounded the most recent algorithm change at Google that prompted Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson to drop in on the DrillDown Podcast to do some grassroots “PR” over the past week.

The drama, in a nutshell, surrounded the fact that a few top Diggers (or, perhaps all of them) felt like that the new algorithm change inappropriately penalized them, and made it more difficult for them to promote stories for everyone to enjoy on the frontpage of Digg.

On this particular “emergency” episode of the DrillDown there was some talk about boycotting Digg and moving away from Digg altogether, as the algo change was thought to be a slap in the face of these Top Diggers who have put so much time and energy into Digg.

Well.

I had some thoughts at the time about the subject, but — and there’s no way for me to say this without sounding pretentious, so I’m just going to say it — it was really busy at hospital this week and I was trying to save some lives.

<shrugs>

Anywhoo, as someone who isn’t a top Digger, but someone who has been watching from a distance for some time, I couldn’t help but come up with a few thoughts (Let me preface this by saying that I know some of these Diggers, and they are fine human beings).  Having had to wait, it really distills down to one point.

Digg is bigger than all of them, and for the average visitor, there would probably be no material change if they left.

The biggest reason for this, I think, is that social news is such a big phenomenon now it doesn’t take many dedicated and active social news gatherers to find most, if not all, socially “acceptable” news in any of the popular genres of news.

Couple that with how easy it is to scan feeds via RSS readers, and the logical conclusion is that its a matter of time before any given story of any particular importance is found.

If the top tier diggers left, the second tier (let’s say the next 100) would likely find the same stories, if a little slower, they would grow their own fellowship or fans over time, and while there would be some idiosyncracies in some of their postings (perhaps a group of them have an axe to grind with, say, the evils of Best Buy, rather than the evils of Scientology), they would — literally — be the next “Top Diggers”.

And nothing would have materially changed for the average reader of Digg — who, I suspect doesn’t have many friends on Digg, doesn’t recognize the Digg “personalities” who are submitting, doesn’t actually submit news, but quickly scans for interesting tidbits while they’re at work or at school.

Where’s the proof in all of this?

Well, if the pipes are built right, you can find out for yourself if the quality of the stuff on Digg changes for your tastes by checking out the mash up for yourself.

What’s the alternative?

One way to get at the bottom of this is to get the current top 10 (or 20, or 50, or what have you) if they’re all in solidarity over the algo change, to in fact, do an experiment of their own.

Stop submitting for 24 hours.  Or 48 hours.  Or 72 hours.  Get them to tell their friends to stop using Digg if you want as well.

And let’s see the effect it has on the quality of the submissions, or, any other metric you like.  Engagement, visitors, what have you.

My guess is that nothing much will change from a quality point of view — mostly because many stories that they would have found will probably get found by someone else.  Oh, and that Digg is so big, and the average user so uncaring about this Drama that none of the other numbers will likely change either.

Hey, if anyone doubts this thesis, or thinks I’m out to lunch, that’s totally fine — and I’m happy to eat big ol’ slices of crow pie if need be.

But there’s a real easy way to prove it, and before I do chow down, I’d like to see that little experiment go ahead first.