Digg: Bitching Got Us Somewhere

So today media linking giant Digg decided to get a little too big for its britches, and like anything else that makes the same mistake on the Internet (well, except for companies with iPhone monopolies), it was quickly smacked down by its userbase.

In short, Digg did a "bait and switch", leading to a lot of shortened links leading to their own website instead of the target, which got people pissed; instead of the websites with the content getting traffic, Digg did instead. People bitched, partners withdrew, and Digg founder Kevin Rose backpedaled. Apparently he was on vacation for the past two weeks, and was very unhappy with the changes - or so says his Twitter.

I'm wondering how he expects us to believe that he has 100% say in what happens in the day-to-day operations of Digg's website. I mean, it's not like he left for two weeks, gave the reigns to a good friend of his, and then came back being like "WTF, man!"

Digg's annoyed me for the past little while, and I did what any annoyed person should do: I stopped using the site. It always irked me that because of algorithms within the site, people who have gotten stories on the front page are more likely to get them there again in the future. I mean, that kind of defeats the entire purpose of having a user opinion-generated frontpage when one user is more likely to have success than another. It didn't help that when I used the site I got people spamming my gmail asking me for Diggs in order to get their stuff on the front page; in turn, it would grant them "popularity" on Digg, traffic for whatever site they were linking and small amounts of traffic to their own personal sites if people decided to look at their profiles.

I don't know; I'm definitely not qualified enough to call Digg a flawed system, but that's my opinion, at least. Nothing crowdsourced online is perfect because there are ways to manipulate the system for those who're smart enough to put the effort in. I guess it's just a matter of wanting to be that person, or just one of the people who agree with them.