Digg Takes the powers off top diggers, gives it to you
Looks like Digg is up for a major overhaul, one that will completely translate its image and reputation, hopefully to better heights. From what I’ve heard and seen, Digg is taking some real bold steps. Completely changing the game they played, reversing the table.
Image courtesy – RWW
As we all know, Digg was both famous and notorious. Famous for its “Digg Effect” and notorious for its “Non-democratic” ways of giving all the powers to top-diggers, who are long time (some not so long time) diggers who has the power to make or break a story. They are influential, and has mostly an army of fellow diggers who vote for their stories, making them to the front page. Now we all know that this isn’t easy as it sounds. There are games being played, hate groups, blind fans, a bit of racism, and all that stuff. Now, you can disagree with me in vain but we all know that if a normal guy (lets say inactive guy or fairly active guy) submits a story, its no way making it to the front page. You need to be an “insider”.
You have to have an army of diggers whom you should suck up to requesting for diggs.
You should monitor the story every hour and see how the diggs come “naturally”.
You can’t just pass the story link via email, but share the upcoming page link, and ask them to find your story from the page.
Trade diggs, reddits, stumbleupons etc.
Stay up late night if you’re on the “other side” of the world to get maximum exposure for your story.
And all that s**t.
So digg is democratic yeah, but all these games are played under the hood. I’m not saying that Digg allows all these on their own, they probably aren’t aware of it and as and when they come across a website/digger that tries to game the system, they ban it as well. But that wasn’t enough.
Now that the new digg algos and designs are coming up, I’m hoping there’ll be some fresh and new change coming in for the good. We’ve heard that it will take away the powers from top-diggers and give it to the people, but how effective its going to be ? I don’t know. Its very likely that the clever ones will figure a way out to manipulate it further, but hopefully, they won’t do it quick, and as they do it, digg gets clever as well.
Have you been using Digg ? How easy /hard was it for you ?
I’ve never liked DIGG because of this. There was no way for the average user to get his story to the front page, even if it was the best story ever. You would have to wait until one of the “Top Diggers” found the story, then resubmit it as their own to make it to the front page. I could never figure out what all of the DIGG hype was about.
I’m looking forward to their changes!
At first, I was not excited about the change. But after reading this quote, I am very excited: “Indeed, the new Digg will now allow publishers to auto-submit their stories through RSS feeds and a number of other mechanisms that the company plans to unveil in the next few weeks. Until now, while Digg didn’t forbid publishers to submit their own content, this behavior was generally discouraged by the Digg community.”
The article you linked to also inferred that it would get data from twitter and facebook to see how popular a link is. My hope is that it will bring more traffic to more quality articles as a whole, which would be good for many people.
I am using digg from last two years, and i am also one of active digger, who mostly joins in midnight, coz digger army works in mid night (night from asia time) and i am totally agree with you about the post.
I haven’t been using Digg much, mostly because of the suspicions that I might be wasting my time. Now reading your article, my thoughts were confirmed.
Do you truly believe that much will change with these new implementations? I seriously doubt it.
Best,
Ana/YourNetBiz