Digg at 1 million diggers: Digital media democracy or algorithm rule?
UPDATE: Digg: Is Kevin Rose on the level?
Kevin Rose is proudly singing the praises of his Digg today, 1,000,000 praises:
It’s now been more than two years since the first story was submitted and dugg on Digg. Since then you guys have helped Digg move from a personal project amongst a group of friends to a huge online community. Now, your contributions in submitting, digging, and commenting on content have propelled Digg to a point I never dreamed of – as of today Digg has one million registered users.
Rose is understandably celebrating the Digg milestone and invites all to celebrate with him at a Digg party!
But is it all thumbs up in digging land? Where does Digg go from here?
I recently mused: The entire blogosphere is infatuated with Digg: Embracing it, cursing it, manipulating it, but most of all praying for traffic from it!Is Digg the “digital media democracy” that it claims to be?
“Digg’s million users raise many questions,” as FranticIndustries underscores:
As much as Digg’s value, popularity, traffic and chances to sell for millions has increased, Digg has also been on a steady decline when one of its core strengths is concerned - news. With more users came more submissions, with more submissions came sensationalist titles, and with those all the important news is stuck in traffic…so they turn to submitting single Flickr images, “believe it or not” facts of dubious origin, and old stories that were around before Digg and were never submitted.This has hurt Digg, although perhaps not in the traffic/number of users kind of way.
With the recent algorithm changes…to believe that Digg is still a democratic, non-editorial site where the users choose what goes on the front page is ludicrous. It’s a democracy where on a voting day, one party has a large, beautifully decorated, fruit-baskets-on-every-corner voting booth, while the other has nothing but a dilapidated desk and a cracked stool….Whatever the criteria are, it’s not based on what users are burying and it’s definitely not based on the quality, scope, focus and attitude of the articles.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
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