Ignore the man behind the curtain
There is trouble in the magical land of Digg. Bury Brigades are attacking, Spammers are lurking, politicos are dirtying the public waterways and those nasty SEO types are trying to take over! What ever shall we do? Who will hear our cries? Who will lead the way? Never fear good diggers for residing in the impregnable ivory tower deep in the Emerald City is The wonderful wizard of Digg and he has spoken:
For the same reason that we don’t expose all of our back-end methodologies for the Digg promotional algorithm, we also don’t expose the details of how the burying algorithm works. We spend a lot of time analyzing our data and understanding how people Digg and bury content. We have spent the last 2.5 yrs building systems that ensure a diverse group of users promote or bury stories.
For what it’s worth, and to shift the blame off of the users listed here - quite a bit of this data was gathered inaccurately as the author states in the Digg comments. Please also note, due to the massive number of Diggs/submissions/buries and comments, Digg spy only shows a portion of the activity within Digg at any time.
source -> The Digg Blog
After multiple cries of terror from the community, mixed in with suggestions from unelected viziers, our Wonderful Wizard of Digg has instructed us to put our emerald glasses back on and ignore the men behind the curtain. Even when others are clearly showing that it is very easy to game Digg our fearless leader is unable to tell us anything.
Perhaps it is time to tear down that curtain Mr. Rose and show us who turns the gears behind the great throne room. We suffer through so many things of late while living in your dream world.
First your most trusted advisers were accused of treachery and rather than defend them you chose to place them behind the curtain. One daring soul managed to sneak a peak behind that curtain and he cried out a list of 100 advisers. He was soon attacked by your Grand Vizier and called a spy from a neighboring kingdom.
The citizens of Digg desire an answer to their problems and all you can give is a few lines of techno-babble. What you do not realize, dear wizard, is that many of your subjects are highly literate and able to read between the lines of your speech.
We tried to bury and ignore all the news of this problem but, since you little people are unable to understand what is best for you, I will attempt to amaze you with the magical words of proprietary knowledge and trade secrets. You see, I would love to share this information with you but then I would have to kill you. You don't want that, do you? So, put your emerald glasses back on and enjoy the magic of the Emerald City.
Move along citizens, there is nothing to see here.
Translation of The Digg Blog
We are not asking for you to reveal your "back-end methodologies" or your "promotional algorithm" all we want is some information on how stories get buried.
Let me offer you a solution oh great and terrible Wizard of Digg. We know you have the ability to track who diggs a story as well as who buries a story. We also know you can track timestamps for these events. Would it be so terrible for you to add a new tab for buries alongside the tab you have for who dugg or blogged this story? You would not need to give names just provide the following information:
- Type of bury
- Time of bury
- Source of bury (upcoming, cloud view, story view, etc...)
You could even include this same information on the dugg/blog side of things to check for gaming.
Is anything on this list a trade secret or proprietary information? This information is already available via Digg Spy, why not make it available on the digg page as well?
I also suggest that all buried stories have a marker that tells us it has been buried and why. This is done for stories marked as inaccurate, why not do it for the other buries too?
We know you attempted to design Digg based on the Wisdom of Crowds but the Wisdom of Crowds requires that each member of the crowd be unaware of what other crowd members are doing. Digg is not the Wisdom of Crowds, Digg is a Democracy.
Let me leave you with a quote from a great American, Benjamin Franklin,
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."
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It has been buried but who knows, if it gets enough diggs maybe it will be unburied? |
Love the new design Steve. And the snarkiness adds a lot of character. I agree with what you are saying here but beware of the Digg Army’s wrath.
I had to throw my own special touch on the current controversy.
How about just implementing one of these solutions:
Do not display the URL from the submitted story on new or upcoming articles. That way, only those who actually read the story and get an informed opinion are likely to make a just – as opposed to ideological – bury or digg.
Alternatively, anyone who diggs or buries more than – say – 5 stories in a minute or less would have their votes count for less, and less still over time if they continued the practice.
Am I the only person on the planet that views wired’s user/submitter attempt as a failed gaming attempt? I mean, the story was buried by digg users rather quickly once it hit the homepage.
I do not see it as a failure.
He used a terrible site design with nothing worth digging and he still made the home page before being buried.
As long as he makes the home page he wins.
Sorry that it has taken me a bit to reply :)
We will just have to agree to disagree on that point I suppose. Though I will use what you said about bad content to make a point.
I firmly believe that a majority of sites that fuss about a bury brigade fall into the poor content category. As you point out, Digg users can see through it.
It would be much more worthwhile to spend money to create good content rather than spending hundreds of dollars on diggs. The author could have payed someone $100 to write up a quality post that would actually last on the homepage.
In the end though, it was merely a paid Netscape nav being paid by ‘reddit’ to take a stab at digg. hardly proper journalism…..
anyways rant over :) good redesign on the site too
Yes, there are many submissions on Digg that deserve to be buried, no argument there.
The point of the Wired article was to show that Digg’s claims of being “game-proof” were false. Saying that Wired can no longer cover Digg because they are associated with a competitor is foolish. If that idea permeated the news world than no one could report on wrong doings at a major media company because anyone doing the reporting would be a competitor by definition!
PS: Yes, the site redesign was looooooong overdue!
Hi Steve!
Your blog looks FANTASTICO! I like the crisp look of this and your CRISP writing too. I wonder just how difficult it is for people to just say what happened? Like – “Man, I got up and had a bad day and this dude Dugg something that made me really mad. So, I just buried it without thinking!”Well, something to that effect any way.
Keep it up man!
Phil
Thanks for stopping by!
Yes, the new look is much nicer on the eyes. WordPress is a lot easier to use than my previous blogging software.
As for Digg… I just don’t know anymore. Alternatives are popping up all over.
Yes Steve, if you break it down to its simplest form, Digg is just a web site. You and I could create it in a few months with some money and people. I think it is more of a popularity contest and back scratching site than any thing else. I have written some decent stuff that never got more than 5 diggs, yet an article about some BOZO video site gets 150? The writing and import of the good article was worth much more.
Yeah, I love seeing what I am in Canada, US, and United Kingdom. Don’t really know why, but i guess it’s nice to see a 11,000 ranking on something :)