Digg

"Diggit" redirects here. For the television series, see Diggit (TV series).

Digg

Digg logo
Digg main page Digg main page as of December 19th, 2006
Type of site	Social content website
Owner	Digg, Inc.
Created by	Kevin Rose
Employees	18
URL	http://www.digg.com/
Commercial	Yes
Registration	Free

Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.

News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ.

History

Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson (who serves as CEO), all of whom currently play an active role in the management of the site.

Digg, Version 1.6

"We started working on developing the site back in October 2004," Kevin Rose told ZDNet "We started toying around with the idea a couple of months prior to that, but it was early October when we actually started creating what would become the beta version of digg. The site launched to the world on December 5th 2004."

Kevin Rose's friend David Prager (The Screen Savers, This Week in Tech) originally wanted to call the site “Diggnation”, but Kevin wanted a simpler name. He chose the name "Digg", because users are able to "dig" stories, out of those submitted, up to the front page. The site was called “Digg” instead of “Dig” because the domain name “dig.com” was previously registered. “Diggnation” would eventually be used as the title of Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht's weekly podcast.

The original design was free of advertisements, and was designed by Dan Ries. As Digg became more popular, Google AdSense was added to the website. In July 2005, the site was updated to "Version 2.0". The new "version" featured a friends list, the ability to "digg" a story without being redirected to a "success" page, and a new interface designed by web design company Silverorange [2]. The site developers have stated that in future versions a more minimalist design will likely be employed. On Monday June 26, 2006 version 3 of Digg was released with specific categories for Technology, Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming as well as a View All section where all categories are merged.

Digg has grown large enough that submissions sometimes create a sudden increase of traffic to the "dugg" website. This is referred to by some Digg users as the "Digg effect" and by some others as the site being "dugg to death". However, in many cases stories are linked simultaneously on several popular bookmarking sites. In such cases, the impact of the "digg effect" is difficult to isolate and assess.

In early May 2007, controversy erupted after Digg began removing information pertaining to circumvention of the Advanced Access Content System (AACS), after receiving a letter from the industry consortium behind AACS that providing links to said information was illegal under the Digital Rights Management circumvention provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. A large user backlash ensued, with users resubmitting deleted stories by the thousandfold, eventually causing the site to fail in the manner of a denial-of-service attack. Following the user backlash, Rose announced on his weblog that Digg would no longer censor the information.

Functionality

Readers can view all of the stories that have been submitted by fellow users in the "digg/News/Upcoming" section of the site. Once a story has received enough "diggs", it appears on Digg's front page. Should the story not receive enough diggs, or if enough users report a problem with the submission, the story will remain in the "digg all" area, where it may eventually be removed.

Articles are short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. All content and access to the site is free, but registration is compulsory for certain elements, such as promoting ("digging") stories, submitting stories and commenting on stories. Digg also allows for stories to be posted to a user's blog automatically when he or she diggs a story.

Originally, stories could be submitted in fifteen different categories which include: deals, gaming, links, mods, music, robots, security, technology, Apple, design, hardware, Linux/Unix, movies, programming, science and software. With the release of Digg 3.0 on June 26, 2006, the categories became divided into 6 containers: Technology, Science, World & Business, Sports, Entertainment, Gaming, with sub-categories.

Criticism

Digg has sometimes come under criticism in for varying reasons. Most complaints are centered on the site's form of user-moderation: some feel the users have too much control over content, allowing sensationalism and misinformation to thrive. The site has also suffered the risk of companies paying for stories submitted to the site, similar to the phenomenon of company-attempted Google bombing. In the same domain, the site has come under criticism for "Search Engine Gaming" and "cluttering Google search results" (a Slashdot effect).

Others feel that the site's operators may exercise too much control over which articles appear on the front page as well as the comments on Digg's forums. Some users complain that they have been blocked from posting, and their accounts disabled, for making comments in the user-moderated forums that conflict with the personal interests of Digg's operators. The existence of the "bury" option has also been criticized as undemocratic and due to its anonymous nature, unaccountable, which often leads to expungement of criticism of hotbed topics like evolution and global warming that does not mesh with the prevailing view of the community. Another criticism in this area has been how a faulty or misleading article can reach many users quickly, blowing out of proportion the unsupported claims or accusations (a mob mentality).

Certain Digg users have been accused of operating a "Bury Brigade" that tags articles with which they disagree as spam, thus attempting to bury stories critical of Digg. One commentator states that one of the site's major problems:

...is the ability of a small number of users to "bury" stories without accountability. Burying news is meant to help separate spam and inaccurate stories from the general morass of ordinary, viable stuff. But there's long been the suspicion that plenty of users use it to get rid of stories about things they don't like (eg political parties or corporates) - since burying a story is much more powerful than simply voting against it.

It has been reported that the top 100 Digg users controlled 56% of Digg's frontpage content, and that a niche group of just twenty individuals had submitted 25% of the frontpage content. A few sites have raised the problem of groupthink and the possibility that the site is being "manipulated", so to speak. In response to this question, the site's founder Kevin Rose has announced an upcoming change to the site's algorithm:

While we don't disclose exactly how story promotion works (to prevent gaming the system), I can say that a key update is coming soon. This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn't mean that the story won't be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.

Other popular news sites have reported similar cases of censorship, including Digg users being banned for criticizing sponsors, or the banning of entire domain names. In response, Rose has stated that:

Once a story has received enough user reports it is automatically removed from the digg queue or homepage (depending on where the story is living at that time). The number of reports required varies depending on how many diggs the story has. This system is going to change in the near future. Soon, reported stories will fall into a 'buried stories' bin. Users will have the ability to pick through this story bin and vote to have a story reinstated should they believe it was falsely reported.

An article on Kuro5hin proposes some solutions to these problems:

1. Open the Digg algorithm to independent study and criticism
2. Make it possible to see who's burying which comments and stories
3. Stop using Search Engine Gaming to abuse search engines and pollute their results
4. Rein in the 'social' features to reduce internecine fighting and people posting just to be fawned over

Tom Taylor has said that:

...the problem lies with either the community or the editorial process. By tackling one of those, you can make your difference.

Metafilter (which predates Digg by a long way) tackles it at the community level. It’s a community weblog, perhaps similar to Digg, but with less emphasis on technology and more on culture, art and those in-between areas. They keep the riff-raff out by charging $5 (one off) for a login, but it’s free to view. It’s a small sum, but guarantees that people who want to get involved are dedicated to it, and it also makes it easier to remove trouble makers. It seems to work - I like MeFi a lot.

As a result of Digg's popularity, other such social networking sites have appeared. One commentator has even made a list of these sites' individual features that, if incorporated, might improve Digg.

HD DVD encryption key controversy

On May 1, 2007 an article appeared on Digg’s homepage that contained the encryption key for the digital rights management protection of HD DVD. Then Digg, "acting on the advice of its lawyers", removed posting submissions about the secret number from its database and banned several users for submitting it. The removals were seen by many Digg users as a capitulation to corporate interests and an assault on free speech. A statement by Jay Adelson attributed the article’s take-down to an attempt to comply with cease and desist letters from the Advanced Access Content System consortium and cited Digg’s Terms of Use as justification for taking down the article.

Although some users defended Digg's actions, as a whole the community staged a wide-spread revolt with numerous articles and comments being made using the encryption key. The scope of the user response was so great that one of the Digg users referred to it as a "digital Boston Tea Party". The response was also directly responsible for Digg reversing the policy and stating:

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

— Kevin Rose

See also

• Kevin Rose
• Diggnation
• Web 2.0
• Social bookmarking
• reddit

External links

• Official site