Connor Wilson » Blog Archive » Where Digg’s Democratic System Fails

Where Digg’s Democratic System Fails

Posted on February 28th in Ramblings — 2 Comments so far. Got something to say?

I’m sure we’re all familiar with Digg’s voting system, and how any registered user can submit, vote on, vote down, and comment on (with the same system for comments). Anyone and everyone can do this, so you would think it’s a perfect world and a perfect democracy, right? Well, even with some recent attempts to make it more equal, including totally removing the power of the top users (at least publicly), it looks as if their democracy system has a lot of major faults in it.

The Bury System. Get rid of it. Seriously, if a story was voted to the front page by anywhere from 30-80 people. depending on the timeframe, why should a number of people who either:
- Disagree
- Don’t like the site
- Don’t think it belongs
- Think the their image of the Digg frontpage is the perfect one.
The latter, would be the people who go around probably digging every story thst interests them, and burying everyone that doesn’t. This is where user-moderation fails.

Recently, Muhammad Saleem of Pronet Advertising found a way to use the Digg Spy to find who was burying what stories, and the evidence is clear and the results are quite proving.
People aren’t Good, or nice. It seems pessimistic, but deep down, every doesn’t want to do the right thing. Whether you pick up someone’s lost wallet and return it to them doesn’t matter here, but what matters is the people that want to do the wrong thing. From the PronetAdvertsing link above, you can clearly see there are specific people burying a lot of stories consecutively, and you can see them burying topical groups such as Sony and Microsoft.An example of this is a while ago I made a post about an online video about the scientific theories of the tenth dimension (the second half of that post). I don’t care who you are, but if you’re a Digg user, chances are you found that interesting. It was extremely well done and supported, but it was quickly burried. Why? It starts with someone not liking it, burying it as lame, then maybe a science expert who believes otherwise buries it as inaccurate, but where do the other buries come from? I don’t know how many in what timeframe it take, but that surprised me.
The Comment System. I guess without this Digg would be hardly social, but the avid comment users who not only post comments constantly, but digg the comments down really help towards getting the story taken down/buried. There’s been past users even who’s only goal was to get buried -1000 or so, and even as the infamous Chandler Kent proved, it’s quite the marketing scheme whether on purpose or not.Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t really bother with digging the comments. I’ll read them occasionaly but I’ll digg the odd one up if I found it funny or the odd one down if the guys being an asshole, but some people take commenting on a story (half the comments are actually unrelated, at all… not even close) very seriously. I guess getting dugg way up is some sort of ego boost… Whatever.

In hindsight, I would say that democracy is the wrong system for Digg. I think they should keep the democratic features of voting, as that is what the entire thing is based on, but the bury feature needs to be removed badly. Why should I not see an article that would interest me because it was against someone’s religion, or dissed Apple? The user’s opinion is important of course, because without them there is no Digg, no del.icio.us, no Slashdot, but people don’t have power over everything in real life (in democracy) for a reason. Consider a more life like democratic style- users vote on a number of people who are proven to be neutral and willing to put their beliefs and political mindset aside to not moderate the stories, but the users.