Well, the past few days have been extremely interesting to me. I'm slowly seeing the downfall of Digg.com, a social networking website where users choose the stories they want to see, or so we all thought. In the recent weeks situations have occured where multiple stories appeared on the front page of Digg.com. The odd part of this was the first 20 or so Diggers dugg each article at exactly the same time. One of those Diggers was Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com
Doesn't this seem just a bit too shady to be a coincidence. When this information was presented at ForeverGeek the submitter was banned from Digg and the story removed, apparently a Terms of Service violation. All similar stories and submitters were also banned or suspended. I'm far too angry to go into details, so I'll leave you here.
The FG post mentioned above should provide more than enough evidence against Digg, with numerous similar articles cited. Let me just say that I've been a faithful user of Digg for a while now, but that all stops now. I'm abandoning this service and I suggest everyone else do the same. The system is corrupted and Digg is wrong in banning people for unfounded ToS violations, especially when users chose the stories they want to see, not the editors.
8 Comments
April 20, 2006 at 1:22 pm
Does this signal the downfall of Web 2.0?!?
April 20, 2006 at 1:28 pm
I think it may in this case. Digg is at the front of web 2.0, so a downfall wouldn’t be good right about now
April 20, 2006 at 2:19 pm
Even if editors are skewing the results, does it really even matter? I doubt anyone cares that much if the results are off a little bit. This hardly signifies the downfall of Digg or “Web 2.0″ — whatever that is.
April 20, 2006 at 2:23 pm
but Glen, it does matter. If editors are skewing the results then users aren’t getting the links they want, they’re getting biased information. For example say I post some superhuge mega article, and then somebody says, wow, the front page worthy, so they copy it to their website and then post it as their own story. All of a sudden all of their sockpuppet accounts and friends digg the duplicate story instead of the original, and all of those thousands of hits go straight to the copycat instead of the source.
it’s just plain unfair.
April 20, 2006 at 4:22 pm
It matters and then it doesn’t. It matters because of the entire philosophy behind Digg. However, this is not the end to Digg or the Web 2.0 craze. Senor, you’re taking this too seriously. I highly doubt it is what you are thinking it really is… I seriously doubt this. Sure, the chances are astronomical but what if it was just a fluke? What if it’s a hacker and they have no control over it but don’t want the public to know? There are a lot of possible scenarios to consider…
April 20, 2006 at 8:53 pm
the fact that digg is contradicting themselves is bad…
no its and buts about it.
does it signify the down fall of Web 2.0? I dont know….
I just know what Digg has done is not fair.
April 21, 2006 at 6:59 am
Logan, the chances that this is a fluke are slim to none. There’s no doubt Kevin and the Digg staff haven’t seen these articles already, and if it were a hacker situation they would have notified the public instead of deleting articles and continuing to not respond to complaints.
this is a situation of the Digg staff being irresponsible, not a fluke or hacker situation
May 2, 2006 at 10:17 pm
It really doesn’t matter at all. People are only upset because they feel they are cheated, when there is no objection about the stories that were promoted.