Various right leaning bloggers such as Michelle Malkin and Little Green Footballs have noticed that Digg's users seem unwilling to accept posts with views they disagree with, generally speaking that would be "conservative" or "right wing" ones. Another blogger recently posted this gathering statistics about the Bury brigade and these sites which merely adds additional evidence that certain bloggers get buried very quickly and consistently at Digg.
However it isn't just Right Wing stuff that causes Diggers to get their knickers in a twist. Wired (owned by CondéNet, which also owns Digg competitor reddit) put a whole series of stuff up yesterday about Digg and the Bury Brigade and (perhaps worse) the way you can buy Diggs. I have never used redit so I have no idea whether it faces the same problems as Digg, but I have to say that the thrust of these articles makes it look like a concetrated hit piece on Digg.
Having said that though, although I first became aware of the Digg issue through Michelle Malkin's blog, the Digg articles on Wired are rather more worrying because they appear to hint at problems with both Digg and other reputation (aka wisdom of crowds) based sites from eBay to Del.icio.us. The problem all of these sites face (other than eBay) is that there is no downside for people who help to game the system because if you get banned you can simply start again from scratch with a new ID and not lose anything much. For eBay it is different becuase not only do you have to buy or sell something to be able to add feedback you also have documented advantages if you behave properly thereby making sure that gaming the system is unlikely to be something done casually (not that eBay is immune from fraud etc but becuase of the financial aspect the gaming level is an order of magnitude lower).
It is unclear to me how we can fix this because it seems like a flaw inherent in the system, however I am sure that the smart guy who figures it out will make zillions.
Blog Home : March 2007 : Permalink