Digg Stops Ranking Top Users: Gentlemen, We Have Finished the Digg Race
In another effort to combat allegations that top Digg users are abusing the system, Digg founder Kevin Rose announced that Digg will no longer rank its top users. Frankly, I don’t see how anything good can come of this. The top users will continue to be visible as dominating the front page as long as their username is associated with submissions, and other diggers can see that the same people are submitting front-page stories continuously. The exact numerical rankings are meaningless. Even worse, the removal of the rankings takes a way a key element of the Digg experience- the game, the rat race to the top, the same reason gamers will play repetitive games for hours and hours on end to get to the high score tables. The incentive of high rank is suddenly stripped away, and many top users feel robbed of the fruit of their labors. As can be expected, some of the top users are not happy.
sicc, one of the top users who has recently dominated the Digg front page, voices the opinion of many:
What reason do we have now for submitting stories to digg? No fun competition for the top user slots, no recognition, what would people even bother? Yeah, I’m going to spend my time submitting news so Kevin can get his site more popular in order to make a cool $200 Million in the coming years, fuck that. I’m going to certainly wait and see what happens, but it’s looking like I won’t be submitting anything anymore.
Kevin Rose is making a colossal mistake by taking the competitive/game element out of the Digg process. You can expect a marked decrease Digg stories that the submitter has no vested interest in. Of course, new users will inevitably step up to fill the vacuum. It remains to be seen whether a Digg without recognition is enough to hold their interest long enough to learn to pander to the Digg community. Kevin Rose has cruelly snatched away the “You’re #1″ trophy from us. The full fallout of this remains to be seen- it is unclear whether the top users, who drive the site with quality content, will continue at the same level of activity.
This would be a great opportunity for someone to step up and create a Digg replacement that adresses the concerns of the top users. With many top Digg users leaving Digg, the opportunity for an innovative alternative is there for the taking. If anyone is planning a startup like that, let me know- I’ll be happy to lend some advice- I’ve come to learn exactly how the Digg audience thinks.
Also, while researching for this post, I found a very in-depth piece on game theory and how it applies to Digg. A great read on the topic that captures my heart: human psychology applied to modern paradigms of communication.
As for myself, I must admit that this throws an unexpected cog into my game. Now that Digg has eliminated rank, the game experiment must be terminated prematurely because the results are no longer quantifiable. What game, you ask? Don’t worry… all will be revealed in the coming weeks. I’ll give you a couple hints though- this and this. I think you can see where I am going with this… or can you?
The little tech editorials and the occasional tutorial are nice diversions, but they are only peripheral to the real , central purpose of this blog: My social experiments and games played out in the realm of Web 2.0. I look forward to sharing my first one with you very soon, and then putting the next one in motion.
Related Posts:
Digg Removes Rank Completely
How Digg is Profiting from All This
Microsoft to Serve Ads on Digg …Bugs Appear Instantly
The Digg vs. Reddit Experiment Deconstructed
The Trouble With Social News Sites(They suck)
It’s saddening to see how this is going to affect the top Diggers, the Digg site itself, and all of the users that have benefited by the diggs submitted.
I’m a NOOB and haven’t contributed anything other than my diggs, but it’s been a wealth of information and entertainment to experience. It’s very disheartening to hear that many of the top Diggers that have been providing the public at large with this may potentially leave…a loss to us all.
Even sadder for those of you that have been in this for such a long time. Hats off to you!
I think it was revealed a while back that they just don’t care about top users and know that someone equally as good (from their big picture view) will rise to the front whenever they lose people.
To show the futility of what Digg is doing, I’ve written a script to display the top 100 users, with the list being updated twice a day. If I can do it in an hour, any company looking to recruit top Diggers could find someone to do it just as easily.
oh my god…quit your whining. digg is supposed to be a community. Not ALL HAIL MEMBERS 1-25 ON TOP LIST!!
Kevin and the digg team made the right choice.
go find a forum or something if you need to feel ‘e-power’ over others.
“go find a forum or something if you need to feel ‘e-power’ over others.”.
Or a blog
The fact is, Digg lives or dies based on the efforts of its top users. If nobody submitted such a high volume of quality stories, Digg would have never achieved such popularity.
Ilya - I’ve enjoyed your blog since you started it but please tell me it’s not going to morph into yet another blog about digg. Nothing against you or digg - much to admire in both — but the Internet and social sites are just not as obtuse as they would seem to be based on the myopic coverage in the tech blogging community.
You got my vote! Who the hell cares about all these jealous bastards. It’s just like the little dweebs getting frothy at the mouth because some good-looking dude gets all the babes so he hacks his computer and crashes it. If you want to get attention from the opposite sex, work out and dress better. It’s the same thing here. Not everyone is cut out for it true but these competitive impulses power Digg not the armchair commentators.
Sorry, my rant’s over…
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Mindspeakr: Thanks for giving me a little dose of reality :). I know the number of Digg-centric posts has recently increased tremendously. This is my fault, as for the past few weeks, I have been actively participating on Digg. Additionally, looking at referrer logs, the vast majority of readers comes from Digg(probably due to my password post which continues to be my most popular post by far with hydralike tenacity. Especially in the tender,young trafficbuilding beginnings of a blog, I am not above pandering to the Digg audience. And if there’s anything the Digg audience likes, it’s meta-ish navelgazing.
So, please, keep reading. There will be maybe one or two Digg-centric posts in the future, and then I will have lost interest in the whole thing.
The fact of the matter is that Digg, for better or for worse, remains the 800-lb gorilla in the social network scene. In a broad sense, this blog is about the way information spreads through the Internet, which is largely through social networks/user-generated content, and Digg, simply through the virtues of its established audience, remains at the forefront of this spread of information.
In short, this is more of a Digg binge rather than an indicator of a complete shift toward Digg fanboyism. I’ll be quietly nursing my Digg-induced hangover for a couple of days now…
I’ve actually been planning to write a post on searchles for some time now, but haven’t worked out an “angle” for it yet.
This is ridiculous, the only people who wanted it taken away were thouse who did not aspire to be on it, i worked my ass of to be in the top 100, and not even nearly as much as digitalgopher or the like of other’s at the very top. The change is crap and they need to reinstate the list.
Ilya - actually, I think your approach is very sensible. You can’t write intelligently about any of these services without fully diving into how they work.
But I would encourage you to dive into many other types of sites in the exact same way - the well known, unknown and everthing in between. i.e. social networking (MySpace IS the 800 lb gorilla), social news, social content, social bookmarking, social search, and so on, and then all the various hybrids. And then after all that, start to really compare the strengths and weaknesses.
Okay, I know the thought of doing that might make you tired already but no one else is really doing this - all the square pegs get shoved into the round holes because it’s easier. BUT - this (IMHO) is where the really ground breaking observations will come from and where shining stars will emerge in what otherwise appears to be a crowded field. The current labels don’t quite fit for where things are going.
I do hope you’ll take Searchles for a test drive at some point whether you write about it or not. (But that’s not wny I commented on your post). I enjoy your perspectives - especially from a previous thread about slogging through the never ending Atlas Shrugged speech!
Keep it up!
I’m still pretty pissed. I’m still using digg and I can still see my overall rank within my profile, but it’s just not the same. I dunno if I will stay or go. I too worked hard on my ranking.
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