Bloggasm

Frustrated casual Digg users, pissed off that their submissions gain no traction while the exact same submissions from power users zip by onto the front page, have launched an online petition to voice their protest. The petition has made the front page of Digg and is quickly approaching 4,000 diggs.

If you’re wondering about the power politics of Digg, you’re in luck. I’ve written two articles on the subject:

1. The politics of Digg: “But despite proclamations of its democratic community — one where a group of users works in tandem to pluck out an important news item to push to the masses — not every vote is created equal. Cohn’s link, for instance, didn’t make it to the front page simply because it led to an interesting story; the tech journalist is part of a band of elite Diggers able to consistently catapult its submissions over the threshold that separates the “upcoming” stories from the ‘popular.’”

2. Dealing with Friend Inflation on Twitter, Digg: “With some social sites, the law of diminishing returns means that increasing the size of the network does little to increase the power of the user. In speaking to power users on the social news site Digg, for instance, I found that the power users who are able to consistently get submissions to the front page often keep tight, closely monitored friend lists.”

Just spotted this on a friend’s submission. Not sure how I feel about it. So far Digg’s recommendation features have been somewhat of a flop, mostly because people often reciprocate diggs and digg content they’re not all that interested in in the first place:

If you’re tuned in to all things Digg, you likely know that another round of power users have seen their accounts shut down because they were allegedly using scripts to auto-digg friends’ submissions.

Every time the spotlight becomes focused on the man behind the current — i.e. power users — there is a new flurry of proclamations of how Digg really isn’t a democracy at all because, well, not all votes are created equal. The social networking site Mashable has a post up rehashing this debate; “In the years following its creation, Digg became less a democracy and more a republic, with a select few users responsible for the majority of front page stories,” wrote David Chen.

This is evidenced by the fact that the average new user could submit interesting links all day and never come up with more than a handful of diggs on each — well below the 100 to 250 diggs needed to cross the front page threshold. But if you were to apply this concept to real-world democratic systems, you’d see that there is nothing undemocratic about this notion.

Since when did the ability to level a single vote ever wield real power? Think of any political or policy initiative, any political campaign, any petition or attempt to bring about real change. Would we ever be as naive to think that without constant lobbying, networking and collaboration, that anything meaningful in a democratic system would ever get done?

So why do we cry foul when a single voice drops a link into an ocean of other links and it doesn’t get much traction? If that voice believes that his link truly is unique and full of all things wonderful, then shouldn’t he have to lobby and push it and advertise it, just as any lobbyist, political or special interest group would?

Digg is so in love with a core set of sites that it would rather link to a Huffington Post piece that links to a Washington Post piece rather than just linking directly to the Post. Web evangelists like Jeff Jarvis talk about the power of the link, but something I’ve noticed again and again is that websites try to water down their links in order to get maximum traffic to posts that are basically regurgitations of other people’s work.

UPDATE; Yet another front page story linking to a Huffington Post article that merely blockquotes an AP excerpt.