Digg Uproar: What's Going On With Digg?

Over the course of the past few days I've been reading about the shenanigans going on over at Digg and felt it is time to comment upon it, besides it's time I've done another blog post. and this is a handy topic. :)

The whole Digg Uproar thing seemed to begin with an attack on Mr. Babyman and Blind Digging.
It seems that some people were unhappy with Mr. Babyman because the number of items Mr. Babyman had go front page and the fact that Mr. Babyman seemed to not click through and read some of the articles he has dugg. It seemed to escape many that if a person submitted 20 or 30 articles a day, then the odds are that 1 to 3 of the articles will go front page -- providing you are submitting the type of items that you have seen go front page time and again. It also escaped people's notice that the mere fact that Mr. Babyman was the Top Digger, he would gather a cultlike following whether he wanted one or not. This following would be more than happy to digg Mr. Babyman's submittals just to try to gain his notice, one blogger calls this "The Suck-up Factor". :)

The attack on Mr. Babyman seemed to lead quickly into an attack against blind digging in general. The loudest of those voicing their outrage at Blind Digging never seemed to define the term "Blind Digging". In general Blind Digging is the digging of an item with-out looking at the article, but how do we know if someone is actually blind digging? Sure we can say things like "If you digg 89 posts in 3 minutes, you're blind digging... but everyone overlooks the fact of "It depends on what you digg as to whether you have to click through or not". For example:

1. Some items submittted to Digg are single images and when the item is submitted the image is sometimes shown next to the description. Quite often a person can see the reduced image and say "Oh, I have seen that 1,000 times over, there's no need to go look at it again.". So all they have to do is click the Digg button and go onto the next item to digg.

2. Another thing is that many of the items on Digg are news items and we are saturated with the news 24 hours a day from multiple sources. When one sees a headline and description that is often enough to judge whether you need to read the article or say "I've seen this before". Once again, no sense in reinventing the wheel everytime... you simply digg the item because you've seen it already.

3. A third thing is that Top Users and normal Users alike are not careful in what they submit. Quite often you will see the same item posted from different sources. The choice of the Digger is to bury all duplicates and risk making people mad at you or just digg the articles even though they say the same thing. The idea behind Digg is to be social, pissing off your fellow Diggers isn't exactly classified as "Being Social"... so many diggers will simply digg the item and be done with it. This appeases friends and fans on Digg alike and is basically harmless. The point is that there is no need to click through to the item in order to Digg it.

There are many valid reasons why a person does not have to waste the time and resources to click on every single item they digg. Yes I said "Resources", which is something many people don't seem to worry about. The fact is that not everyone has 2 gigs of memory to waste, some people operate on much less and every window being opened affects that memory. Windows has always been a lousy resource manager, it's not so quick to return resources it uses. The end result is that by opening screens unnecessarily, this can (and often does) tie up resources on the person's computer.

This uproar over Babyman and Blind Digging seemed to quiet down for a few days, but never fear - there is always something on Digg to cause unrest. This time it was the fact that familiar "faces" seemed to disappear. It quickly became known that Diggers were being banned, as many as 600 bannings were said to have happened. There is a list of 150 Diggers who were banned on the net The fascinating thing about this list is that it only contains 5 out of the Top 100 Users (about 3.33%), 72 more (about 48%) were ranked from 101 to 1000 on the Social Blade list. This meant that about 48.67% of those being banned by Digg were 'Normal Users". This is an interesting piece of data for it indicates that the normal, everyday digger who is not a part of the Top 1,000 abuse Digg as much as the Top Diggers are said to abuse the system.

At this point let's back things up a little, Zaibatsu posted an article on a blog and said that he was not banned for using scripts. Zaibatsu was banned for posting a link from a Spam Site, so the accusation by Digg states. No one brought forth evidence about Zaibatsu to the contrary. Next we have ZoomTechTV who resigned from Digg, I believe his resignation was in the Grim Reaper Visits Digg blog post. So why were these Diggers banned?

It appears that many of them used scripts, but some used a script that was not designed to Digg or submit. This script was one to keep track of one's Digg Friends, according to Diggboss. So what's the harm in utilizing a script to help one keep track of one's friends on Digg? Don't ask me, ask Digg... they are the ones making the call. As far as I am concerned Digg should have methods to keep better track of one's friends on Digg, afterall it is one's friends who mostly will digg our submittals and isn't that what friends do - they look out for each other?

One of the newest articles on the net goes by the headline of Thinking Like Kevin Rose: What Does The Digg Founder Have in His Mind? This article is written by a man named Manish Pandey and it's a fairly good read. I don't agree with all of Manish's views on the subject, but I respect them and will go a step further... he might actually be right! :) The one issue I disagree over is about Blind Digging. When I was on Digg I have done more blind digging through the Upcoming pages than anywhere else. On the Upcoming Pages all you have to do is click on 15 Digg Badges and move onto the next page... the amount of time to digg a page was about 10 to 15 seconds. Others I've talked to has accomplished this feat in as low as 7 or 8 seconds and there were times that it took a whole 20 -25 seconds to digg a page of 15 items because of the load time to bring up the next page or because of scrolling too far and having to backtrack to catch a missed item. When friends sent their shouts, you had to at least go to the page to get at the digg badge. This usually only had taken up 1 to 3 seconds to load the browser screen and set the page so you could see the digg badge, plus the time to scan the description and title. As you can see, there wasn't a great deal of difference in time, but there was enough loss to make a shout from a friend slower. Quite often the title and description were enough info to tell a person whether they had to go to the actual item or not.

On the other hand, like Manish I have mixed feelings on this. It seems to me that the Digg Fixes are like putting a tire patch on the Hindenberg... i.e not enough to actually fix the problem. The root problem with Digg are those who want to dictate how a digger is to use the site. It doesn't lie in blind digging or the top users monopolizing the front page, it lies with those who are on Digg and trying to control it when they have no legal or moral right to control it. Each Digger should be allowed to handle their accounts as they wish... as long as they are not using scripts or bots to cheat the system. A person should be able to give his or her diggs out as they see fit, there is no requirement on Digg that states you have to love the item you digg... and how could they tell whether you loved it or not anyway?

If Digg felt it was necessary to put 'stops' into their system then that would be fine. Let's say it takes an average person 3 minutes to view a Youtube video, 1 minute to read an average story or news article, and 5 seconds to view a static image. This averages out to about:

180 seconds + 60 Seconds + 5 seconds = 245 seconds/3 = 81.67 seconds (1 Minute, 22 seconds)

There are 86,400 seconds in a day (60 seconds x 60 minutes x 24 hours), this averages out to a person being able to digg approximately 1,057.92 posts per day. Now if Digg simply said the upper limit for the amount of diggs per day were 1,000 diggs, or 42 Diggs/hour... they could be perfectly justified and still give people plenty of diggs per day. Hell with 1,000 friends, that is a potential of 42,000 diggs per hour or 1,000,000 Diggs/day... and how many of us really gets that kind of response? :)

The fact is that if a person is happy digging only 1 post every 3 years, they are free to do so... but if a person wants to digg 1,000 items a day - that also should be their perogative. Signing up to Digg isn't like signing up to the military, it's a damn social site on the internet... let it remain social. For those who are disgruntled because they can't get the diggs they want -- let them find the right friends who will give them the numbers they want. It's absolutely impossible to be friends equally with 5 million other Diggers, when groups are that large then the main group will break up into smaller sub-groups. It's just the way things work. If Digg wants to give everyone an equal chance then perhaps a new formula for Digg needs set up to where the program automatically applies a digg from each member to each member and take the abillity for the freedom of choice out of the equation entirely. The one thing Digg can't do is allow the Digg Mafia and Bury Brigade to dictate policy.