Why users can’t moderate Everything
With Digg giving all the power back to the users, to promote good stories, and bury bad ones, and same for the comments- the users have all the power. With a site as big as Digg, which is now 1,000,000 users strong, user moderation becomes less and less of a good idea.
Case 1- The “Bury Brigade” so to speak. It’s not so much the fact that there actually are these people that go around burying every story that doesn’t fit their perfect mold of a Digg homepage, and in turn good, well written and interesting stories are swiped off the front page. Then there’s the occasional people who will bury a story without actually knowing the whole deal. For instance, when Dreamhost launched their new panel UI, and it made it to the Digg homepage, it was promptly buried. Why? Who knows. Then my ‘duplicate’ story starting getting all these diggs because DreamHost was linking to it. Is it a duplicate if it is totally sanctioned by the original author? Is it still ‘blogspam’?
Answer: no, it’s not.
Now, I can’t speak out of plain truth, as I, nor anyone but the select few Digg employees, have not seen these statistics, but I’m 95% sure that it takes much less buries than diggs to be removed.
How does that give the power to the people? If over a thousand people digg a story, it can still be removed! That isn’t giving the power to the people, it’s giving the power to the people who sit on Digg all day and will either digg or bury every story they see. How many people does it really take to get a story taken off the homepage?
Once a story actually hits the front page, it is subject to thousands of visits, and hundreds of diggs. How many buries is it then subject to? I think that if a story with over 1000 diggs got buried 100 times, it would be taken down. Maybe not even 100, as that seems like a lot of people to disagree so much as to want it removed. I’m sure people would bury a story without even reading it if it goes against their religion, ethics, values, or even their favourite NCAA team.
And there’s another thing: how many people actually read the story fully before deciding whether to digg or bury it. Personally, being an active Digg user, and it even being my home page, I read the story before I digg it, and if it didn’t interest me or I didn’t like it… I won’t digg it. Simple right? I won’t digg a story because it had a great title or well written description. Those are just things that will make me more likely to read the whole thing…
So to conclude this part, I leave you with this question: Is it power to the people if a select group of 50-100 can void the opinions of thousands?
Case 2- The Digg demographic. Even they’ve said it to be highly male, 18-34, which you would expect a tech news site (essentially) to be. There are other topics on Digg, such as World and Business, Sports, Science, etc… but it’s proven that they are not as popular by the sheer amount of Technology stories submitted in comparison.
What’s important about this demographic? Out of any demographic, the young, and admittedly nerdy males are most likely to spend the most time on a voted news site, and bury stories. There isn’t a big argument here, as they can’t change who their market is.
Case 3- When it’s all put together. The aforementioned bury brigade is a group of obsessive diggers who just because they are the epitome of the demographic (more like the extreme of it) that their views matter more than the 75 people who originally thought it to be interesting, and the thousands afterward.
So in the end you have this: the power is given to the people, the people can also take it away. What needs to be fixed is the amount of people that can take it away, or even after a story hits 200 votes or so, it can’t be buried.
Anyways, rant over.
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