mashable.com — Examining the events of the past few weeks reveals several important lessons about how Digg has handled the establishment and growth of its community. But perhaps more importantly, the way that Digg has gutted user morale and shown itself willing to cast off those that have been so crucial to its success also reveals the limits of its core model
Oct 8, 2008 View in Crawl 4
solargarlicOct 9, 2008
I'm digging this story because it does attempt to explain the potential pratfalls of any potential social media company, not just digg. I do recognize the slight anit-digg sentiment though (which isn't to say it might not be warranted [how's that for half-asses commitment])
Closed AccountOct 9, 2008
Your a great friend. Please don't leave.Nuff Said.
1776Oct 9, 2008
Digg's biggest problem is that it dropped the ball on Public Relations. I don't think Kevin Rose and Digg admins are evil or bad for wanting a clean and less spam-driven Digg. However, I think they've done a terrible job of leading and communicating, it most certainly isn't their strength and decisions to retroactively ban when the very engine behind Digg pretty much encourages digg exchanges, shouts and IMs has been left untouched. FTA: "Communities Require Nurturing – The way that Digg has treated it users has not been with the committed touch of a benign leader, but of a dictator that assumes its actions (or lack thereof) will be consistently met with the assent of its followers. Its town halls have been little more than PR exercises, and user-requested features like the Recommendation Engine have taken years to roll out, while others (e.g. forums) have yet to be implemented at all."Digg is to blame for a lot of the negatives that come with the community and even more so for the lack of awareness of how much sacrifice users make to be a part of a community like DIgg. Given that many users spend hundreds of hours every month on Digg, they should at least be treated with a modicum of respect rather than receiving bans for perceived bad behavior.Digg's traffic has hurt considerably since the first round of bans came in over the summer, which suggests to me that they seriously underestimated the importance of their more active users - be it via comments, submissions, or both.
1776Oct 9, 2008
'these are not users who were digging stories based on the merit of the story, rather holding up "their end of the bargain" with mutual digg friends. can't you see the problem here?!' This is true, the system has degenerated into "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours". However, that is basically what the system encourages. The system encourages shouts, gives you IMs, encourages diggs galore if you really want to spend your time doing that. If they really wanted this to be a legitimate social networking system where all of the problems you list are done away with, they could! That isn't what this is about, it's about having a clean business model and a spam free community and at this point it's hard to have both and they know it.
ofnumbersOct 13, 2008
I should really start to take my own advice.