The Problem with Digg
Digg is hip, digg is fun, every geek likes to compare their list of dugg stories, and gets a thrill from a submitted story hitting the digg.com homepage. But Digg has a problem. As it’s user base has risen, and the site’s design become more refined (latest iteration released today), the perceived quality of the stories reaching the Digg front page, and of the comments individual diggers leave regarding stories, has declined. The most common explanation given for this decline is the dilution of quality attendant to increased popularity; as Digg becomes less exclusive, it attracts a broader, less technically literate, and younger audience. Digg’s democratic structure leaves it open to collective dumbing down (and deliberate spamming) in a way that Web 1.0 social new sites (Slashdot etc), were not. However, let me suggest another potential explanation for the variable quality of news on Digg.