Posted on 09/07/2006 1:49:52 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Are Diggs democratic values in peril? Complaints have emerged that a small group of users are manipulating which news stories appear on the websites homepage.
Digg is a website that promotes news stories submitted by users. If enough users digg a story, the article will make it to the sites homepage and heaps of traffic will flow to the link in the story. Digg prides itself on using a different methodology than the hierarchical editorial systems that other news sites employ.
But one blogger took a close look at Diggs home page this week and concluded that a small group of influential Digg users, working in concert, were responsible for a significant percentage of the news stories on the page. The complaint follows accusations that political bloggers in rival camps were acting to remove each others posts that had been digged.
Some suggest that serious Digg users, who are rated based on how highly ranked their stories become, simply spend more time searching the web and are more successful finding articles to digg.
But that argument was clearly not good enough for Digg co-founder Kevin Rose. While noting that users ought to recommend each others stories to share and promote news that is important to them, he wrote in his blog that Digg was changing the algorithm used to rank top stories on the home page.
I can say that a key update is coming soon, wrote Kevin Rose in his blog. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn't mean that the story won't be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.
All this was a bit too much for Diggs top digger, known as P9. In a scathing post, he accused Mr. Rose of pissing all over the sites top diggers and announced that he would no longer support Digg.
PING
Rigging Digging?
Who woulda guessed!
i'm a digg user and like it. it is left-wing like everything else out there but compared to slashdot it's more balanced. at least with digg it's not a few editors in charge of everything.
as a whole the politics are strange there.
1.pro-israel
2.pro islam yet anti terrorist
3.pro-american
4.anti-bush
5.pro-*buntu
6.anti-linux
7.anything web2.0
i strongly disagree with what makes it do the frontpage, it is clearly rigged but after that there is a balance.
Glad I'm not the only ones who sees through those leftists.
No kidding.
Thanks for posting this. Frankly, I'd never heard of Diggs, and from the sound of it, will never go there.
Not worth it. Digg is a bunch of punk kids devoid of logic and posting skills, liberal like most kids have always been and of course know it alls. I just leave them alone as a perfect example of the ignorance and selfishness of youth. The problem I see is kids that come to FR and show off those same characteristics, there's a half dozen or so that frequent tech threads and defend the leftists that have bribed their support with free software. Feel free to help me further expose their ignorance most any day of the week.
We've got a small but very vocal leftist population right here on the tech threads on FR. Take a look at my posting history to find the threads filled of moonbats, mostly 20 something kids. Here's one right here, look at the posts from today and notice how they all showed up about the time school normally lets out. The rest of the thread is arguments with guys from overseas named after and defending Russians, etc:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1731023/posts
If we can't even root them out from here there's no chance in bringing change to digg.
Why don't you practice on the FR tech threads first. When we clean the leftist moonbats from here I'll help you with digg.
Great screen name - but what's a "digg"?
I just read the article and discovered what this was about - sorry about the question.
Why not name names?
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