Stop Shouting! (Digg Buries the Shout Feature)

The ongoing attempt by Digg.com to fake a user-content generated, “democratic” website while pleasing it’s proressively-minded investors continues. After “tweaking” it’s algorithm to make “Diggs” (votes for stories) generated from shouts worth almost nothing, the front page still was not reflecting Digg admin’s desired results, so they’ve simply done away with the feature. Here’s part of what the Digg Bloggers had to say:

…As some of you know, shouts have been a controversial feature since their inception and considering the ever-changing landscape of the social web, we’ve elected to remove them in favor of more popular options. We’ve added easier access to sharing via email, Facebook and Twitter. As always, we want to encourage sharing and communication within our community and will continue to look into features that address these needs…

So, if you want to alert your friends about your great stories on Digg, you’ll need to do it via e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter. But be prepared. If it hasn’t happened already, Digg will find a way to make “Diggs” from those sites worthless as well.

Ministry of “Truthiness” – thy name is Digg.com.

10e20 has some good perspective and more details about the changes here.

Hat-Tip, Dr. Bill of the ARRA News Service

…What you can Do on Digg

Last week, we discussed Ask Not what Digg can do for you… because the truth is that if you’re a political conservative online, Digg isn’t going to do anything to help you. We can’t ignore it, however, because it is still so influencial in what is percieved as the “truth” online (more).

So, you’re one of the brave conservatives who has decided to face the Digg Monster head-on. Now what? Following are some lessons we’ve learned the hard way. I hope you’ll be able to use them to improve your own Digg experience.

1. First, you’ll need a Digg ID. For security and privacy reasons, you’ll need to choose a name that is not related to your real name, your blog, your place of business, your usual online profile, or your residence. Plus, if you’ll look through the UserID’s for the other Diggers, you’ll see that catchy, weirdly-spelled online nicknames are “cool” (and we all want to be “cool”).
2. Do not immediately begin “friending” or becoming a “fan” of all of the conservatives you find on Digg. Digg has this thing called the “algorithm.” It’s basically a way for the Digg administrators to manipulate the content of the front page to please their investors, while pretending that all of the content is there because of the “democratic voting process.” This algorithm discounts votes for Diggs between friends.
3. Look at the upcoming stories, and Digg/comment on those that you like. If you see stories that are stupid or false, bury them. Become active in the comments.

Read more

Ask not what Digg can do for you…

…The truth is that if you’re a political conservative online, Digg isn’t going to do anything to help you. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. News articles and blog posts that become popular on Digg, the largest social driven site on the web, also tend to hit the front page of Google, the most popular search engine on the web.

Scott Cleland of Precursor, shared with me that studies have been done which indicate that students have an increasing tendency to believe that what comes up in a Google search is the truth (a couple of good studies are Maryam Moayeri: Lost in Cyberspace: Where to Go? What to Believe? and Educause: Google Jockeying).

To illustrate my point, I ran four random searches last night off two “Top Ten” lists on Digg. I’ve shown below the stories, then the searches I ran, which have the search words highlighted. Every time I do one of these experiments, I actually hope it won’t work, because that would mean that Digg’s influence on public information was waning, but the results of these spot-checks were quite predictable. Read more