Digg.com is worthless as a democratic concept

I WAS RECENTLY rather enamoured with the site Digg.com, it looked rather neat, a sort of thing with moderators that took less than a week to act. Better yet, there were no moderators, it was all up to us. Democracy, yay. Take that you pigs, we rule here. But this is probably going to go down as one of the biggest failed experiments on the net.

Read the Tom Lehrer quote again, and think about why not too many writers of Fan Fic make it to professional careers in TV and movies. Going from 'Kirk looked longingly at Spock, ripped off his shirt to expose his muscled pecs....' to a real writing career is not generally a sane career path.

Blogs are about the same. There are good ones, don't get me wrong, but most are terrifically bad, true atrocious monstrosities that track the evolution of the web. Going from pictures of my cat to goth poetry from teenagers whose mother didn't hug them enough to the blight of modern blogs, it is a mess. It is getting worse quickly though.

Luckily for humanity, the editing process has been left to professionals, or in our case, monkeys on crack. Regardless, they are professional monkeys on crack, and they show a good deal more common sense than the unwashed masses. Judging from the few bloggers I have met, I mean unwashed in the literal as well as figurative senses.

Enter that wonderland called Digg.com. It put the editing chore to the people. Unlike Slashdot - where you can moderate things up or down a bit with your karmically derived moderator points, Digg is a free for all. It has all the common sense of the lowest rung of it's readership, it is The Nanny of net communities, the lowest common denominator among an already questionable sort.

This comes up because last week I wrote a rant about gaming, and it was doing rather well. It got tons of hits, links all over the place, including Digg, and to date 134 letters with an inbox full still to sort. The letters ran more than 90% positive, with most of the negatives were honest intellectual disagreements. There were a few flames, probably less than five. The comments on Digg were similar in proportion.

Then the story on Digg went away. I was watching a server install, and went to read the comments, and I couldn't find it. Maybe I couldn't remember the title, so I looked it up, searched on every possibility, and still nothing. I did however find a story posted in response to it, but the original was nowhere to be found. Slightly confused, I wrote Digg asking what happened. This is what I got back, spelling not corrected:

Try to keep in mind that the digg community has complete control over the content of the site. You and ever registered digg user has the power to promote stories to the homepage AND remove them. That particular story was overwhelmingly reported as lame and subsequently removed.

digg support

It would be a fair explanation if it wasn't for the fact that the comments I got, and the comments that Digg reflected in its own section simply did not show that. Could it be that it's hiding something? Ah well, who cares, it really is not worth my time and effort. Then this one went up, and vanished. Last I looked, the gaming rant had about 650 diggs in four hours before it disappeared, and the iPod one was over 1000, well over. Gone, no trace, unsearchable. In another ironic twist, the iPod story is back up with a link to a blog post linking to my article. Oh irony, thy name is Digg.

OK, now I was curious, and got a letter pointing me to this article. From this it appears that Digg's policy, other than not allowing their employees to use a spellchecker, seems to be that if 10 people report something, it gets blackholed. It doesn't matter if more than a thousand like it, just 10 votes for anything bad, and it goes bye bye for good, and there is no recourse.

Democracy in this case is lead around by a pack of mouth breathing, knuckle-dragging, trailer-trash wanna-bes. Damn, there is a parallel there, but I just can't put my finger on it. Anyway, it seems that any 10 twits can shut down any story for good, and since you can make an account on a whim in about five minutes, with an hour's worth of work, you can take all the submitted stories off Digg. Your PR department doesn't like the results of a story, it can be shut down in 10 minutes, and Digg support won't care.

They just look at the numbers and tell you that it was reported 'lame', but won't tell you what the numbers were. So, if you are a politician, and your pictures liaising with a goat get linked to on Digg, no problem, it will be gone, unsearchably gone, in no time. Ah, democracy.

What you end up with is that any rabid fanboy with an agenda can shut you down. Anyone who has even the most passing familiarity with how any forums work will know that there is always one or two who are simply flaming nutjobs. Usually they reside in the 13-15 year old basement dweller status, use way to many 0s in place of Os, and have an agenda. My l33t gaming box has a GeForce 4400 in it, so NVidia rUl3z!!!! and ATI suxxx0rz! Any pro-ATI story will drop off the front page in 5 minutes from that point on.

See the problem? Digg is so badly broken it is worthless. The feedback replies are staffed by folk that don't get the concept why it is broken, but are probably unwilling to do anything about it, if comprehension miraculously dawned.

So what do you end up with? A good idea that has hit the iceberg and is taking on water fast. Almost a good idea really, but reality intruded. Digg has started its death spiral, and will be overrun by twinks in short order. Management doesn't seem to care, or even get the concept, and just point to the fact that it is what the people want, unfettered.

People want reality TV too, oh joy. µ

L'INQ
The People Comment - well that's always been true...