Can Digg be democratic?
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 12 September 2006 at 11:20
Tags: Digg
The social news aggregation site Digg.com came under fire this week from critics suggesting that a small number of its users disproportionatly influence which stories appear on its front page.
Digg allows users to submit links to news stories from other sites and vote on their placement. Eager to benefit from the huge surges in traffic that a front-page placement on Digg can bring, news web sites (including this one) have been adding features to encourage users to submit their stories to Digg and similar sites.
Digg is often held up as the quintessential “Web 2.0” concept that harnesses the “wisdom of crowds” to highlight information of interest to its community of users. But the critics say that far from being this apparently democratic form of news selection, a small inner core of heavy users carry disproportionate weight on the site by submitting many stories and voting for each other’s submissions. In response, founder Kevin Rose promised changes to the Digg ranking algorithm to reward diversity of interest in a story.
But it’s not the first time that Digg’s democratic credentials have been called into question. Back in January, the Wall Street Journal reported that it took the votes of just 50 users to move a story to the front page of the site. At the time, Lloyd Shepherd (then of the Guardian and now Director of News, Sport and Information for Yahoo! Europe) noted that this was “a very small, statistically almost insignificant number of individuals” and wondered whether such sites were actually any more representative of community interest than what a team of responsive editors can achieve.
Since January, Digg has undergone a major relaunch and has probably done more than a little tweaking of its algorithms to mitigate against these presumably unintended consequences of the “one percent rule” — that only a tiny proportion of users actually participate regularly in “participatory” media.
Tags: Digg
