Digg Changes May've Increased Quality, But The Community Is In Turmoil
This week there's been turmoil in the
Digg world, as the Digg developers strive to reduce the influence of the top users - in
other words make the system fairer. As Kevin Rose recently wrote,
their aim is that "a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story
homepage-worthy".
However this has caused an uproar amongst Digg's top users, who feel they have been accused of gaming. Apparently most of Digg's top 20-30 users have refused to contribute or digg stories since the uproar happened. Or if they have dugg stories, they've been buried by other users - check out this short thread for an example.
This is a serious upheaval amongst the Digg community - and it's begun to affect the discussions. In this digg thread, a top digger named Digital Gopher gets a very hard time:
And see this recent Digg thread entitled Top Digg Users Removing Avatars Hired by Netscape, which links to http://americanhistory.about.com/od/traitors/. Heavy stuff.
I'm told that the (non-public) forum for the top users is a very heated place right now!
Stats suggest quality has improved?
DuggTrends, a digg stats website which has been tracking the results of the Digg user revolt, suggests that quality has actually improved as a result:
"Concluding, we can infer that Digg's front page promotion algorithm has changed to bring quality to the users. It maintains a balance between quality and quantity. This might make things not so easy for a story to get promoted to the front page, this has been raised by top users some 30 days back " is DiggTM punishing most popular users" and now it is being raised by rest of the users but this improved the quality of stories promoting to front page. The new proposal of assigning weights depending on the diversity of digging and various other factors should bring balance to the whole system and we sincerely look forward for all the users work together to provide valuable content through DiggTM."
DuggTrends graph showing drop in front page stories
If it is true that frontpage quality has increased, then it looks like Digg's upgrades are working - and the system is fairer. Personally I don't think the top diggers were at fault in all this, it's just that the Digg system did unfairly give too much power to the top diggers. That has apparently now been fixed.
Now the big question is: can the relationships - between Digg, the top users, and other digg users - be fixed too?
UPDATE: DuggTrends has updated their post: "We are not hinting that the drop is due to any algorithm changes on 7/09/06 but it is because of the lack of top users activity on digg. Regarding the "quality changes" we were refering to the algorithm updates done in between 20/7 and 27/07."
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Digg has failed to clarify & Communicate Properly with its top users, Historicaly, and specially in Kevin's last blog. Digg needs to be more social with its contributors, and needs to publish a user-manual, to clarify lot of issues to diggers.
AAAZ
How does a decrease of stories making it to the frontpage show an increase in quality?
As I have stated on other blogs. The new algorithm might prevent gaming of the system, but it also decreases the relevance of the stories that make it to the frontpage. Now stories will make it to the homepage with fewer diggs by a smaller number of users since all the top diggers are being penalized.
Something needs to be done to prevent gaming the system, but I think this turns out to be a misguided way of doing it.
How about try some innovation and add some automatic personalization algorithms to take the reader into account?
"Top Users"? You guys simply don't understand that you're nothing special. If you move on, someone will replace you. Stop whining.
I was under the impression that the Digg changes were in the works. Where does Kevin Rose say that they've been implemented? I think the reason the number of stories on the homepage have dropped is because the top posters are rebeling. Or people are less trusting of Digg right now.
Richard, it's always a pleasent surprise to read your perspective on things because they tend to be much more objective (i.e., backed with evidence from screenshots, forums, etc.) than the vast majority of other editorials out there.
Here is my take:
http://www.crowdedweb.com/articles/2006/09/08/digg-vs-netscape-web-meet-democracy-democracy-meet-web
Why am I not surprised that 20-30 of the top users have boycotted Digg because they are no longer influential.
I sincerely hope that the team at Digg tell them where to go. We don't need a group of power hungry individuals controlling the media. Digg must also realise that they still have a wealth of top users - its just a ladder and those complaining will simply be replaced.
And with it now being a common occurrence that the front page stories are duplicated in submission many times over, it hardly seems a problem.
Did anyone Digg this entry yet?
http://digg.com/tech_news/Digg_Changes_May_ve_Increased_Quality_But_The_Community_Is_In_Turmoil
Also looks like DuggTrends has updated their post to say that the perceived quality increase is *not* due to any recent technical changes:
"# There is some misunderstanding that because of the new algorithm changes there is a huge drop of frontpage stories on 7/09/06. We are not hinting that the drop is due to any algorithm changes on 7/09/06 but it is because of the lack of top users activity on digg. Regarding the "quality changes" we were refering to the algorithm updates done in between 20/7 and 27/07.
# Yes, it is too early to predict what updates were done on 7/09/06."
I haven't noticed any change in promotion requirements My stories still getting promoted at steady clip.