The Digg Paradox: How Digg Creates the Problem It Solves
by Marion Jensen
When I first heard about Digg I was quite excited. Digg is a site where you can submit articles, pictures, or other content that you think is interesting. If other people like the story they can “digg it,” and it pushes the story to the top. The content on the front page only contains articles with a lot of diggs.
What appealed to me is that you don’t have a “gatekeeper.” You can submit content to Slashdot, but there is a group of editors who have been hired to sift through stories, find the good ones, and ultimately determine what makes it to the front page. When you have gatekeepers, you will have bias. If they are not interested in a certain topic, you’re out of luck. If a thousand people are interested in a topic, but the editor isn’t, you’re out of luck.
With Digg, this isn’t a problem. It’s democracy in its purest form.
Which leads to the problem.
Let’s look at an example. This article about Yahoo rejecting a Microsoft bid was submitted to Digg 59 days ago. You can’t tell by the time any longer, but it was submitted several hours before this article, about the same topic. The latter article was the one which ultimately made it to the front page.
I see four problems with this scenario.
First, although the one article was submitted first, ultimately it was the second submitted article that made it to the front page. Not a big deal, but it starts to raise a red flag. Why did the second article make it, even though the first article had several more hours to collect diggs? The Digg submissions were linking to different articles on the same topic - maybe the article that made it to the front page was of higher quality?
Which leads us to the second problem. The article that made it to the front page can be found here. It is three sentences long. The rest of the page seems to be nothing but ads, ads, and more ads. The article that didn’t make it can be found here. In my opinion, the article that didn’t make it is superior because it links to outside sources, is clear and concise, and goes into depth. So it can be argued that the article submitted later, which made it to the front page, is of lower quality.
The third problem is that of duplicate articles fighting to get to the front page. The article that didn’t make it got 95 diggs. Anybody who has submitted articles to Digg knows that it can take a long time to get that many diggs. If you have 5-10 articles on the same topic, and they are all getting dugg, a “breaking story” might not make it to the front page for some time because the votes are being spread over a number of articles.
Finally, what I ultimately see as the biggest problem of Digg takes us back to the “gatekeeper” issue. My initial excitement over Digg was the removal of this gatekeeper. If a story is good, it will make it to the front page. But this example shows me that this might not be happening. Instead, what I’m seeing is a group of submitters who have risen to the top and now have a better chance of getting material to the front page. In fact, we’ve ended right back where we began, with a group of gatekeepers. But it’s worse than that.
Often these power diggers seem to push their own site or maybe a site with which they have an existing relationship. Otherwise, why the low quality submissions? Minimal content or stories are copied from others sites and then combined with tons of ads on a new site (as is the case in our example). In other words, these gatekeepers now aren’t pushing material they think is interesting. Rather, they seem to be pushing whatever reused content is on a predefined set of sites with which they are likely to have a relationship. Conflict of interest in its purest sense.
So, in the end, we’re left in the same situation as we were before, except the gatekeepers aren’t paid employees who must demonstrate competence in their job or risk being fired, but people who are pimping unoriginal, copied content - likely for personal gains. There will always be bias in these “gatekeepers,” but blatant bias can be dealt with in the first model, not as much in the second.
There has been a lot of talk about Digg vs. Slashdot (which uses paid gatekeepers). In my mind, there is little comparison. Slashdot is not a perfect model, but Digg is even less so.
So, if you want pictures of cute puppies, stories about topless women, and random interesting tech articles posted as a copy of a copy on somebody’s personal website (that you can see after you’ve closed all the popup ads), then keep digging away. If you’re looking for something a bit meatier, I recommend Slashdot or any of the other “traditional model” sites.
For more on issues with Digg, albeit addressed in a different way, see this article.
14 Comments 
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April 9th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Nice analysis, Marion. So any suggestions as to how Digg might overcome these issues?
I’m thinking part of the problem stems from the fact that the Digg crowd seems to be on the verge of a revolt any time a change is made that they don’t agree with in the aggregate.
April 9th, 2008 at 8:29 am
Maybe they should make the postings anonymous, so you don’t know who submitted a story ?
April 9th, 2008 at 8:39 am
TLP-
Interesting idea, but how would you do that without eliminating a big chunk of the whole “friends” aspect that seems to be at the heart of any web2.0 site?
Personally, I think the friends feature of Digg is pretty weak as it is, so I wouldn’t mind seeing it go IF it meant better content. But I may be alone on that…
April 9th, 2008 at 9:09 am
[...] the story to the top. The content on the front page only contains articles with a lot of diggs.read more | digg story Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can [...]
April 9th, 2008 at 9:15 am
I’m not saying that Digg is perfect, but some of your conclusions are wrong.
First of all, the example you gave between your story and the one that got frontpaged. If you take a look, breitbart has an Alexa rank of 3,600, so it gets thousand of visitors per day, and more of them are likely to digg the sotry from the website, especially with it having digg button on the page. You have also, but your traffic doesn’t compare to breitbart’s.
Second of all, you said that power diggers use digg to promote their stories or sites they’re involved in. That not the truth and it’s a conclusion of someone who doesn’t really understand digg. Maybe once in a while they submit this kind of stuff, but they also submit tens of great stories everyday, so they really deserve the “power digger” status.
So, I am also upset when a story of mine doesn’t hit frontpage, but that doesn’t mean that Digg is crap.
April 9th, 2008 at 10:19 am
I’m sorry, but Digg is crap. Total mob rule masquerading as a “power to the people” kind of phenomena. There are way too many stories from certain select sources (Ars, Engadget, Gizmodo) that don’t prominently display a “digg” button.
They seem completely unwilling to make an honest assessment of what needs to change with digg too. They could have developed a system to deal with duplicates (maybe like Techmeme a bit?) but no they needed to remake the comment system to heavily use AJAX just so it was more Web 2.0ish. They implement a friends system with “shouts” but then punish you if your friends regularly digg your stuff.
I used to like Digg when it was new, but I’m back to Slashdot, and Techmeme too.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:02 am
This article has already been written about 13,000 times. Anyone who has used Digg on a regular basis knows all of this stuff. In fact you left out how some of the top users turned into crybabies and threatened to boycott the site when some changes were made to the algorithm, threatening to make it harder for their submissions to make it on to the front page, and thereby cutting into their revenue. Someone should slap them with a shovel.
April 9th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Vlad,
Your point of a site with huge traffic being favored by Digg doesn’t really contradict any of the points being made here. In fact, it’s just one more issue. You’re just pointing to traffic rather than people as another form of the “gatekeeper.”
Some of us remember, back in the day, when Digg was just as much about undiscovered content as it was the mainstream. But as Paul pointed out, Digg has an overabundance of stories from select sources (Ars Technica, Engadget, etc.).
April 10th, 2008 at 5:53 am
The problem I have with digg now is I just can’t push content that I care about. I love politics, science and tech stories.
Well, thanks to the algorithm, if it’s not a cute photo, a sports story or an offbeat comedy piece I can’t hit the FP.
What’s worse is I think the digg community or at least the (digg algorithm / ghost moderators) heavy handled approach with us power users, forces us to play to a greater audience.
So I go for the known, sites that people will digg up, because I know if I post a story about some great new solar powered concept from a little know blog, even with my weight on digg, it just won’t make it to the FP *sigh*.
The FP matters, less and less to me, I really enjoy the diversity and content that I can find in upcoming everyday, but the real passionate users in science, politics and tech are dropping like flies.
Hopefully the new and upcoming vanguard of new diggers can carry the torch and bring an influx of great stories… not the 20 hour stale crap that we’re forced to endure. Check my submissions, on only stuff that hits is crap, I’ll admit to it. But the stuff I care about dies on the vine, so I give the algorithm the crap that it so loves.
Oh and to all the people who think Andy and I make money of of digg, well… type Andy Sorcini into google… he works for Disney and doesn’t need the money and well I’m just plain well off, I do this for fun. Oh if you mention our podcast we have 1 sponsor $250/month. that’s dinner for 2 nights for me…
God sorry to sound like an arrogant bastard, but I ate when people think we’re on the take.
Sorry peeps, love all you diggers, even the ones that hate me, keep me in check, tell me when I post crap.
Oh I’ll even put money where my mouth is, a free iphone to anyone that can show that I make money off of digg.
Damn, I think I had too much wine tonight, lol.
Peace
Z
April 10th, 2008 at 8:00 am
A lot of these issues have been solved by Mixx.com. Mixx already has a breaking news funtion, a related news function, and I think that the dupe detector is much better.
April 10th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
All valid points, I recently wrote about my own frustrations with Digg. I’ve gotten a few stories on the front page and last night had one that I felt was clearly meant to be taken as fiction “buried” and all but removed from the site due to accusations of it being “fake”. I thought it would be another way to promote something that was generally well-received on its own, but the whole thing has really soured me on Digg. Bring on the gatekeepers, I say.
April 11th, 2008 at 11:20 am
[...] founders discussing priorities and progress and how Digg is just a game. Second, we discussed the Digg paradox and how getting rid of the editor/gatekeeper just creates new [...]
June 9th, 2008 at 10:36 am
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July 17th, 2008 at 2:47 am
[...] have covered Digg issues plenty before. The site’s problems are easy to sum up in one sentence: It’s [...]