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My impression of Digg power users at the time was that many of them were participating in voting rings to promote each other's sites and a few were even making

My impression of Digg power users at the time was that many of them were participating in voting rings to promote each other's sites and a few were even making money pushing links to the home page. Not all of them of course, but the few that did were ruining it for everyone. So I question the conclusions that the article makes based on asking these power users. I think that power users (the bad ones) were the root cause of Digg's demise as they pushed bad content to the home page and forced the company to impose more restrictions and limit communication (collaboration) channels. On the other hand, Reddit reduced the potential reward for gaming the system by 1. dividing the community into smaller subreddits, 2. Allowing down votes, and 3. varying the time a link stays on the home page based on user feedback. They did many other things better as well, but these stand out as important differences that allowed reddit to control the spam problem better and keeping the communities interesting.

floody-berry 14y ago
All the top users on Digg aggressively dugg each others submissions, that is undeniable. What's more, because of the "I'll vote your shit up if you vote mine up" mentality, and the ability to easily follow users to see what they submit and vote on, they also acquired hoards of normal users who would do the same without reciprocity in hopes of joining the top ranks. It would've been a fairly worthless currency if not for the blogspam networks like Gizmodo, Engadget, Tech Crunch, Mashable, Cracked, Life Hacker, etc. that sprung up to funnel Digg's firehose of users on to ad-laden pages. While no system would be perfect, Digg's made it excessively easy to game (maliciously or otherwise) and the content of submissions soon became almost irrelevant compared to who was submitting it.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  That sounds very eerily similar to J.K. Galbraith's description of trader collusion on the New York Stock Exchange in his classic The Great Crash 1929. In it he describes how traders would fix prices. The general public, though aware of this, still participated in the market -- there was no where else to invest, and there were some gains that could accrue to them as well. In a sense, a stock exchange is also a sort of social network. Curious thought, that.
phaedryx 14y ago
I probably would have stayed with Digg if they had implemented one feature: "ignore all by X". I wish I could have, for example, hidden all posts by MrBabyMan as easily as I hide all Farmville updates on Facebook. Instead, they kept tweaking their design and algorithms until I got annoyed and left.

floody-berry 14y ago

All the top users on Digg aggressively dugg each others submissions, that is undeniable. What's more, because of the "I'll vote your shit up if you vote mine up" mentality, and the ability to easily follow users to see what they submit and vote on, they also acquired hoards of normal users who would do the same without reciprocity in hopes of joining the top ranks. It would've been a fairly worthless currency if not for the blogspam networks like Gizmodo, Engadget, Tech Crunch, Mashable, Cracked, Life Hacker, etc. that sprung up to funnel Digg's firehose of users on to ad-laden pages. While no system would be perfect, Digg's made it excessively easy to game (maliciously or otherwise) and the content of submissions soon became almost irrelevant compared to who was submitting it.

dredmorbius 14y ago
That sounds very eerily similar to J.K. Galbraith's description of trader collusion on the New York Stock Exchange in his classic The Great Crash 1929. In it he describes how traders would fix prices. The general public, though aware of this, still participated in the market -- there was no where else to invest, and there were some gains that could accrue to them as well. In a sense, a stock exchange is also a sort of social network. Curious thought, that.

phaedryx 14y ago

I probably would have stayed with Digg if they had implemented one feature: "ignore all by X". I wish I could have, for example, hidden all posts by MrBabyMan as easily as I hide all Farmville updates on Facebook. Instead, they kept tweaking their design and algorithms until I got annoyed and left.