By Demotivating Its Top Users, Digg May Decline

micropersuasion.com — "Let me preface this post by saying I love Digg. It has become a site I rely on a lot for tech news, gossip and just plain old interesting stuff - like the Boeing 707 John Travolta keeps in his garage. But today Digg put a nail in its coffin by removing its leaderboard of the top diggers. Why? It may demotivate users." - Steve Rubel Feb 2, 2007 View in Crawl 4

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johnnychan Feb 3, 2007

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Maybe not a "nail in its coffin" but it certainly reflects a disconnect between its strategy and leadership. Ego plays an enormous role in social networks and communities. It's deflating for users to not be recognized. I agree with Steve and I think his idea for revenue-sharing has merit.

ryland2 Feb 3, 2007

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I agree, removing that list is screwing over all of the users have put hundreds of hours into this site. Even those who were not highly ranked would feel screwed if the little recognition they got was taken away from them.

gnutzu Feb 3, 2007

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I don't see a problem with having some form of motivation, but I don't see why we have to have a fixed notion of what that motivation should be.I think that we should:1) re-evaluate our community objectives for Digg2) consider what forms of motivations would contribute to those objectives3) consider the full ramifications of those motivational schemesThink about this for a moment, and I think you'll see that people will have a wide variety of opinions on this. I think that there will have to be a period of adjustment without the top users page before anyone will really be ready to consider where we'd want to go next.Personally, I'd like to have a variety of ratings to suit the wide variety of personalities on Digg, but I'd like to avoid encouraging social ranking and elitism (not that Digg had really gotten all that bad).