Digg.com used to be one of my favorite sites, but no more. If you look at my recent shared items you’ll find a bunch of links to recent blog posts discussing the ongoing problem of a few users controlling the site’s content, which would appear to run exactly counter to Digg’s “the power of YOU” business model, yet is allowed and even supported by digg’s current terms of service.
The concept behind Digg is simple enough: Users submit stories to Digg, and other members vote on them by either ‘digging’, or not. The problems arise when a small group of members begin to dominate the community by ‘burying’ stories (and consequently, sites) that they view as undesirable content for digg.
Here’s the problem: Legitimate sites have been permanently banned from Digg after being buried by members who, as a group, report them as spammers. I just finished reading through the past several months of John Chow dot com to see what in the world could have gotten this site permanently banned from Digg.
John Chow is the founder of The Tech Zone, a site for tech reviews, news and articles. I’ve used several of the reviews in the past when researching gadgets. John also has a blog (and has for the past five years) where he writes about SEO, tech, Web sites, and other topics that interest him. He’s a guy who knows a lot about a lot — an entrepeneur running a strong Internet business. Like most internet entrepeneurs, he has posts about Google, making money on the Internet, taxes, SEO, and web trends. And because it’s his blog, he also has posts about games, his family, media buzz, and reactions to silly things like Time naming YOU person of the year.
Here’s what John Chow isn’t: A spammer. Yet, Digg banned John’s site permanently after he was reported as a spammer by a group of “antis” who buried anything of his submitted to digg. In fact, they went so far as to bury a post by a friend of his about a toddler who needs a bone marrow transplant. After receiving 200 Diggs, a group of 10 marked it as spam and it disappeared from the site.
This is not democracy. Anarchy, perhaps, but not democracy. Here’s a smattering of the comments on the Bone Marrow Transplant post:
By kevin45 (most recently dugg story: Wii Drum Machine):
Oh yeah ok, because this spam should be allowed.. why. Next thing you know theres hundreds of these posts. Cest la vie.
By BearOwned (most recently dugg story: Move over Firefox: IceWeasel is HERE!:
Sorry, but the Internet is not the place for this. I, like many others will merely write it off as spam. Now forward this comment to everyone on your buddy list and Bill Gates will gives us both a dollar!
By h3ndrix (most recently dugg story: “Break Your Cingular Contract Without a Fee!”):
Honestly, I don’t want to sound cruel but isn’t really kind of like spam?
A real humdinger by Freaktrap (most recently dugg story: Download at 37,000 Kpbs using nothing but a regular… SNAIL!?):
They are just trying to prevent Digg from being flooded by messages like this…If this becomes a trend and it grows, then who knows how long it will be before we start seeing diggspam for the Christian Hungry Children Fund and the Christian Adopt an Ethiopian Child Program?
Severious, kevin45 , and revidium then do a “group bury” of the article.
Here’s what happened to this sincere and heartfelt appeal to get the word out to locate a bone marrow donor for a 2-year old child: A bunch of gamers decided it wasn’t worthy to be on ‘their site’. I say: Screw them.
They did this to John Chow, Paul Stamatiou (who I voted to receive a $5,000 scholarship based on the quality of his blog and who I discovered on Digg.com originally) and a number of other sites. A part of me isn’t surprised, given that Digg was created and represented by Kevin Rose, who makes a point of getting drunk in public at least once a week and spouting off about things like games, gamers, and why the Wii is better than the PS3 and why XBox Live beats them all. He may have been named one of the top 10 sexiest geeks (a study in contradictions), but he’s no community expert.
As long as a small group is allowed to control Digg’s content, there can be no democracy and digg will fail, because the content will reflect the point of view of a bunch of aging Peter Pans with little compassion and too much time on their hands, which thankfully, is not the view of the majority.
Advice to people looking to get the word out about bone marrow donors and the like: Try working through the communities of the news sites that reported the story, or Newsvine or just use the Power of Blog. Don’t bother with social networks that have members still concerned about things they cared about in high school, or how drunk Kevin Rose can get on homebrewed beer.
Coming back to John Chow’s site: He has a terrific post that he wrote back in October about Google Whores , where he listed the top 10 and the estimated monthly revenues from Adsense. It’s no surprise that Digg was #2 with an estimated $250,000 in Adsense revenue. That post was Dugg over 1200 times. He’s got other articles that aren’t quite as attention-getting as that one, but to me, more valuable. His list of Top 10 WordPress plugins, is one I bookmarked after I saw it on Digg. I’m sure the “Digg This” link has been removed from that list, given his site lockout, but it’s still an excellent list.
John Chow is exactly the kind of blogger that should consistently be on Digg’s front page, and his banning proves that Digg has outlived its usefulness as a model.
One final note: Let’s get the word out about Harrison Leonardo, the boy who needs the bone marrow transplant. Show the Lost Boys on Digg that people matter more than whether the Wii can be hacked.
Technorati Tags: digg, john chow, john chow dot com, mob rule, web 20
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