The Digg Effect – Corrupted?
Over the last 2 days, a huge controversy has erupted over the apparent super-editorial rights exercised by some Digg administrators to “kill” stories in the digg queue.
It started with this article, which pointed out that something was not right in the number of diggs listed for 2 stories.
It appears shortly thereafter the article was pulled and the entire domain was banned. Any attempts to further submit the article results in warnings that your digg account is under threat. From the original site, the 2nd part of the story.
Eventually Kevin Rose of Digg replied, but the PR nightmare was in full swing by then.
Most interestingly, Slashdot got into the act and posted an article, which attracted a host of comments on slashdot’s own moderation policy.
In the end, I think it should be accepted that in any website, the people who started the website will always feel they know what is best for “their” website. If that means granting themselves super-user rights in a “democractic” site, that is to be expected. George Orwell got in right in 1984 and what he said there applies to almost any co-operative human endevaour.
If Digg bots manage to push spurious stories to the front page, I would expect a digg reader to have the brains either not to click on the link, or actively remove it from the queue. Hollering about perceived censorship is just hot air.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 11:01 am and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on April 25, 2006 at 12:11 pm memigo wrote:
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on April 28, 2006 at 1:15 pm David Sterry wrote:
I think Digg and Slashdot have done a good job covering tech. It’s got to be hard for Digg to keep their front page respectable when some users may do things that aren’t in the interest of the users at large. I’m trying to cover other kinds of news with some similar features over at my site. Hopefully, the points system I’ve setup will encourage people to both moderate each other and to post quality comments. We’ll see.
Comments Over News
on May 3, 2006 at 7:32 pm Balaji wrote:
Hi David!
Don’t you think once your site reaches a certain critical mass, the spam bots that affect digg can be tweaked to comment-spam on CommentsOverNews.
I’d take the example of Indian elections here – they are chaotic, quite a bit of vote-stuffing and booth-capturing goes on, but at the end, it works in a fairly good manner. Users and admins of digg or slashdot should similarly accept that there can be spurious stories in these sites. Niether set of individuals should complain about such users or censor stories about these things. Just aim to fix things instead.