Digg Blows

While I won’t pretend that I’m ever going to do something to Digg, or its creators (nor do I intend on anyone’s interpretation of this to lead to action), I am calling this a manifesto. I need to illustrate why Digg has become a disease to the internet, and why it has to be stopped or reformed.

Digg has been around for some time now, and the Lord knows I was one of the bigger advocates for the site. I’d often hear someone say:  “I saw this on Slashdot.org this morning…” to which I would always reply: “Yeah, I saw that on Digg.” As often as not, I’d hear “What’s Digg?” I’d tell them the whole story. Digg.com is a user-submitted news site, where people who - in their daily internet travels - stumble onto something which they thought the rest of the internet community might be interested. They would come to digg, create an eye-catching title and intruiging description, and post the link. As people would check out the story, if they liked it, they would digg it, or bury it if they didn’t. The more diggs the story got, the higher the story was rated, and the more visible it became.

The idea was noble. It was simply a way of getting information in front of the people who want to read it. It was a better way (in my opinion) of publishing articles like this than Slashdot was doing. I checked digg once, maybe even twice a day for almost a year. I got some great industry, political, and pop culture news from the site. I had water cooler chat for every trip to the water cooler.

The biggest benefit to digg for me was that when I “dugg” an article, digg remembered. Once logged in, I could go and find all of the stories I had dugg to date. This meant I didn’t have to fill up my browser’s “Favorites” or “Bookmarks” feature. Officially, digg is a “social bookmarking” site, so I was using it the way it was perscribed. Everyone was.

As is the case with anything shared between more than two people, once something is deemed to be corruptable, it will be corrupted. Digg is not only NOT the exception of this rule, it’s also pretty much the epitome of corruption. Al Capone himself would be proud of the way Digg has been exploited. We’ll discuss this in detail in a bit, but I’m in a rant here, so I won’t touch on the specifics yet.

Once digg began to slide down the slopes of corruption, there was no hope for it. People use it for personal gain, profit, and even as a weapon in some cases. Digg has done nothing constructive for the internet since it began its decline. Digg has risen to the top of most of the “most/biggest/best/” website lists since it hit the big time. But much like digging an article on the site becomes self-serving to the article (the more attention it receives - the more attention it will receive), digg was experiencing the same effect. The more media attention digg got, the bigger digg got, which in turn kept the media coverage at a peak. It was (and still is) a vicious circle. As digg acquired more and more users, the quality of stories to be found on the site went down. The quality of the diggs went down. The quality of the comments for each article went down. The downward spiral got tighter and the fall got faster.

Of course there are those of you who don’t agree with me. This post is for you. Those of you who see things my way understand what I’m talking about. Let’s move into the specifics.

 As I touched on in the prologue, digg works by user-submitted stories, and a ranking system revolving around the number of diggs a story receives. The more diggs, the more popular. The more popular, the more visible. The more visible, the more diggs the story will get. While this is a wonderful way to present information, it’s also the key to the “dark side”. Once it was thought of to exploit the system, there was no short supply of rogue marketers who realized that digg + popularity = large quantities of traffic. All they needed to do was post their ad-laden website on digg with a catchy title (and maybe a video or picture) and watch the traffic/paid advertising metrics spike.

Being dedicated to his cause, Kevin Rose - founder of digg - deferred action against these folks for abusing the privileges. Rose believed (and would have us believe) that digg users would sort out the good from the bad, and the self-policing society would prevail. Well, Kevin shows his age and wisdom with this maneuver. What Rose failed to realize is that human nature dictates that humans will seek out that which they’re told not to. People will actually visit a website to see why they shouldn’t have visited the website. If you’re an advertising affiliate, does it matter why someone visits your website? Nope. So why should thye care when a story is sought out because it was the most “buried” story of the day? They wouldn’t. In essence, leaving the police work to the users actually gave people more than one reason to visit a story, and gave them the tools to label a story as either “see this (digg)” or “see this to find out why you shouldn’t see this (bury)”.

In the long run, Rose and his digg flunkies decided it was time to alter the ranking algorithm. No longer was digg going to base the popularity of a story solely on its digg activities. Digg was going to put the emphasis back on “social” in “social networking”. Digg was going to change everything.

I don’t recall precisely when digg made the change, but it’s been a while now. Digg took back the power from those who knew how to get a story dugg just to profit. What they did was make the popularity a function of the number of diggs + the number of friends the story submitter has. There are other factors, but nothing so heavy on the equation as diggs + user popularity.

Then, all you needed were a few clicks and a story to get promoted. Now you need to have a gigantic network of friends to get noticed. As more and more content publishers and submitters utilize digg, the pool of potential top-popularity gets bigger; it’s harder to get noticed. The buddylist system works here too. If you’ve got 200 friends, there’s a good chance a bunch of them will see your article, even if they don’t digg it. This means that your foundation diggs (the ones that might get you noticed) should come from friends.

All digg really did was replace a bad apple with….well, another bad apple. Instead of trying to generate diggs, people started trying to build their friends network.  What’s wrong with that? Well, because of the motivation for wanting friends, digg was no longer being used in it’s original context. It became little or nothing about user-submitted stories, and everything to do with being popular. Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not against a popularity contest. They’re fine. (especially in the social networking scheme - see MySpace.com) What I have the problem with is that while digg continues to allow this popularity contest to continue, a good, high-quality news aggregation service (which I frequented daily) continues to suffer.

While the friends network craze happens, the quality of the stories continue to decline. It’s difficult to find a story which was published by a reputable news organization. Everything on digg these days (see the feed to the right) links back to a blog, or some gimmicky website offering us a “Top 5 reasons why…” or “Why we shouldn’t be to hasty to purchase….” variety. If you failed to pass 5th-grade English, I guess I need to tell you that anything that states reasons is opinion, not fact. News is not opinionated; news is fact. Editorial comment does not now, nor will it ever constitute news. If  wanted to read editorial, I would visit the chat forums for a particular subject, not visit digg to stay informed.

Does this mean I’ve never enjoyed an editorial-style article on digg? Heck no. I’ve had my share of fun with the site, but my frustrations and patience for reading garbage on digg has reached the boiling point. I’m fed up and I have created myself a platform for expressing myself as it concerns digg.

I’ve authored a letter to Mr. Kevin Rose explaining my frustrations with the site. I’ve explained how poorly constructed his notion of duty to the internet community is. I explained that digg has become a haven for fanboys (people who love a brand, product and value be damned) dedicated to shitting on Microsoft, pissing on George Bush, shooting a load for Mac and Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or Stephen Colbert, and how unhappy I am because of it. I told him how angering it is that digg spends time and money building technologies to foster such an unhealthy growth, yet refuses to improve the poor functionality of the site. I watched them revamp the user’s section and buddy list, but neglect the poor searching, and lackluster user interface. I asked him  how he can ban my website from digg for publishing a blog article entitled “Stephen Colbert” sex tape! (WITH VIDEO), yet he lets’ people post something like “Why I’d ask Stephen Colbert to the Prom”.

My letter continued by asking Rose to compare what he is presenting with what he imagined. I asked him to identify why he lets digg blow the way it does. I received no reply. I didn’t want one. I just wanted to make him aware that there are others out there who don’t see Rose as a pioneer in the social networking sphere. We see him for what he is: a greedy self-serving business man, who’s selling his image as a hip technocrat, who cares about the people more than the money. I wouldn’t have a problem with is form, except that he’s a hypocrit. Digg isn’t open, it’s not “free” (as in free software/GNU). It’s not about anything but capital. Fine, Kevin…fine. But don’t lie to me. Don’t ban me for a garbage story, but not the next garbage story that comes along. Weed all the garbage out, not just the ones that don’t financially serve you.

I mentioned a while back that digg has become corrupt. I’ve spent the last few paragraphs outlining that, but I’ve failed to touch on the syndicated nature of the corruption in and surrounding digg. Yes, the corruption is syndicated - meaning there are multiple parties working together to benefit illegally (or in violation of diggs Terms of Use). Here I’ll explain these tactics - which Kevin Rose couldn’t stop, even if he tried (which he’s really not trying to stop).

• digg Syndicates: A digg syndicate or digg farm is an organization which sells a potential submitter a number of diggs at a pre-defined price. It’s not uncommon to see these numbers range between $0.50 - $1.00 per click. This is to say that I have something I want prominently placed on digg, yet I fail to maintain the buddy list or popularity with my user to obtain the necessary number of diggs to really make it big. I’ll contract a company like this which will give me X number of unique diggs. If I’m a popup advertiser or something similar, $250 might be well worth the price to get 10,000 diggs/clicks into my sight.See these:
  http://www.getdugg.com
  http://www.usersubmitter.com/Notice each of these links is permanently listed on the left side of this page….
• digg Attacks: Much like digging stories to get paid, one can just as easily take a site offline with a shitload of diggs. Let’s say you sell bicycles, and your competitor’s website sells bicycles too. If you can get it done with digg, you can knock your competition offline by digg bombing or digg attacking them. It’s basically a “DDoS” attack (Destributed Denial of Service attack). The point is to send more traffic to your competitor’s web server than it can handle, which will crash the server. This can be devistating to an unwitting and unprepared website. It’s malicious, and mean, but it does happen. It happens all the time.
• digg Tools: While it’s not deviant, underhanded, or mean…digg has provided an opportunity to folks (with or without permission) to capitalize on digg. Many developers have created tools which help people contribute to the popularity of a story, view upcoming stories, digg or bury stories, or even get diggs or buries quickly. The whole time digg is reaping the benefits of the attention and traffic gained by such tools on one hand, while threatening lawsuits for copyright infringement on the other hand. While it has remained below the radar, sites like DiggAlerts.com let people notify a group of people via email when a story has been submitted the email recipients are then asked to go and digg the story for the user. The stipulation is that when the submitter gets an email to digg, the other submitter can count on them for a digg.
• Paid digging: While similar to digg farming, paid digging (or commenting) pays someone for their power on digg. Let’s say the HBE corporation (which I made up) is unveiling a new product today. They want instant traffic, so they’ll pay a digg member to post a story about their product and get it dugg. Depending on the level of diggs and popularity, some submitters might make  $5000 or more on a single story. In this instance, digg has become a strict paid marketing tool, which is virtually the opposite of what digg was supposed to be.

 I’m not a perfect person, and my reasons for doing things aren’t always divine, but I would never let a concept of mine become mutilated to the point where I couldn’t recognize it anymore. Kevin Rose has no character, and fell in love with the dollar signs. His website (and my news outlet) have suffered on that account, and I’ve had it. I shall no longer resort to Digg.com for my news. I will use Slashdot.org, The Drudge Report and Drew Curtis’s Fark. I will make every attempt I can to profit from, exploit, and further cheapen digg. Although I encourage you to do the same, I also encourage you to do it legally, and morally. I will not be held liable for your moronic activities. I am not the leader of a revolt here (not yet anyhow), and I don’t want to be part of your schemes. This is my manifesto.

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