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Recently the “version 4” of the social new web site Digg was released. Being a casual used of Digg for a few years, following it through all of its “versions” since its first public release, I mostly remained a passive user, observing the technologies that run the web site and its users.

The latest version of the site was quite a departure from its previous incarnation. Before, users would “digg” or “bury” news items submitted by users, and the most “dugg” items (“diggs” minus “buries”) would show up on the “front page”. Freshly submitted items remain in the “incoming” section of the site until they drop off or are promoted to the “front page”. Individual users can “digg”, “bury”, “block” or “report” once for each news item.

There are many ways you can game that kind of system away from its pseudo-democratic behaviour, but they mostly revolve around having lots of users (real of fake) perform the same operation uniformly. The workaround done by the operators of Digg was to identify “power users”, that is users whose operations are recognized with higher strength. That strength is not displayed to end users, nor whom are power users, nor even the process used to identify what users should be power users.

In a way, Digg was always centred around the idea that it is “social”, in the sense that having groups of users “digging” each others' submitted stories make those stories promoted, or that otherwise unrelated users “digg” some random stories but only those from the “authority” of power users are promoted. It is to note that while Digg allows users to identify other users as “friends” within its site, most users that want to game Digg normally use multiple alternate accounts and external channels to make uniform but time-distributed actions.

This seems to be in direct contradiction to what Digg users consider to be “fair” or “cheating”. Most users seem to be under the impression that Digg is purely “democratic” and that “power users” and implicit “secret” user groups are ways of cheating that system. An example of the user outrage at such “cheating” is their reaction around an undecovered American Conservative group. What was valued by the users of Digg was that promoted stories tended to be unbiased towards specific influential users or groups (ideological, political, commercial or otherwise) and more a “democratic” representation of its entire use base. In a way, users expected Digg to be “anti-social” in its way of identifying and promoting popular stories by identifying implied connections in its social graph and demoting them, but over the years Digg actually tried to promote the inverse.

The new version is a complete departure from its “democratic” news aggregation approach and now fully relies on social graph connections, making it a simple form of Twitter for news. “Digging” has no more meaning than having multiple friends “retweet” the same link, which can already be aggregated by Google Real-Time and bit.ly. Basically, Digg has lost most if not all of its unique value it had.

Is there still value in real-time, “democratic” vote-based news aggregation other than just for its users? On its own, the infrastructure cost of having to deal with a large volume of independent submission and voting operations may not be recouped by the relatively average number of page views and ad impressions. It may have value for news agencies, so it is not surprising that a site running a similar system, Reddit, is owned by Conde Nast at low cost and without an aggressive push for revenue growth.

So I’ll stick with my Twitter feed, my RSS aggregator and Reddit, thank you. It’s been a nice 5 years, but you’re now dead for me.

P.S.: More on the user reactions here and here. And, yes, I’m still using Slashdot and Reddit.