SUBBITT

There's obviously been a lot of angst, heartache, frustration, and downright depression over the last couple of months since Digg started changing their algorithm. Not within certain groups, most notably new users and top diggers (although they, too, have been feeling the pinch as of late), but among the Digg "middle class", which actually represents the largest slice of the user pie.

Now, to the new user, things look much as they've always looked... stuff is submitted, stuff gets on upcoming, stuff goes popular. If you shop at one grocery, and all they have is bread, milk, sugar, soap, peanut butter, and toilet paper, and that's all you've ever known (like say, communist Russia), then life looks much the same as it always did.

To the rest of us, however, we knew Digg when it was a veritable supermarket, where you could get anything and everything you wanted, and then some. Sure, it was up to us to buy it or not (bury or Digg up), but at LEAST we had that choice, and that opportunity. Maybe we occassionally had to spend a little more time looking, but at least it was there if we wanted it.

But what the powers at Digg have done has left me totally perplexed. Why would you want to go from something that offered that kind of variety to a stale, eat what we have to offer social site?

The reasons we've heard through the roundtable discussion and various interviews basically comes down to one thing: the Digg powers don't like Digg being gamed, and to a certain point, that's understandable. Perhaps they had a vision of what they wanted Digg to be, and the Digg they got turned out to be very different, like the proverbial computer that grows so powerful that it becomes self-aware. But isn't the whole idea behind a social site that it grows and evolves based upon the society that uses it? And therein lies the real fallacy o the way Digg has changed: when you start to try and control the masses, it is no longer a social site. Digg has become communistic, and the evidence is clear:

The social structure is controlled by a small group of power-holders who've basically decided that a real democracy is not what they want.

What goes popular is controlled. We all know that submissions disappear without any reason... they vanish like dissidents, never to be seen or heard about again. We all know there's a human element that kills stories. We know. 

It takes a tremendous amount of effort to get a story popular, somewhat akin to toiling in the field all day for those few rubles a week.

For the most part, the stories we do see in popular are sparse and old news, like a state-run newspaper. Look and see for yourself. You can get fresher news from MSN (shudder).

I could go on and on, but I think the point is pretty clear.

Now, let's address the fallacy of "gaming the system". First of all, who really cares if the system is gamed or not? If it's crap, it generally gets buried. If it doesn't, then that means that the item is of interest to enough people that it does deserve a place in Popular. There is no crime in a niche story.

Secondly, who really cares if people make money or gain something from submitting stories? I'm not talking about people who make a living off of promoting websites for cash, I'm talking about you and me. We have blogs, we want traffic. If we happen to make a dollar or two off adsense, big deal. If we gain a bit of notoriety, what is wrong with that? What the Digg powers are fighting against is absurd. To put it into perspective, what if tomorrow, we wake up to discover that there was a meeting of world leaders who put out a mandate stating, "The use of the Internet for personal or financial gain will no longer be allowed. We are tired of people gaming the Internet. The Internet was originally formed as a means of sharing information amongst the scientific, military, and academic communities, and that's all we'll allow."

What is Digg made of? Internet users. To realistically expect that people will use Digg (a website on the Internet) purely as an information outlet and put aside all personal benefits is ridiculous.

There's a saying that any publicity is good publicity. Well, I say, any traffic is good traffic, and Digg's focus should be on that fact, and that fact alone. Digg's marketability depends more upon its traffic than anything else, and the Digg powers would be wise to remember that. The general consensus among the majority of users is that they are not at all happy with Digg as it now stands, and were more than happy with Digg as it once was.

We love Digg, and used to love Digging stuff, but enough is enough. Please give us back our supermarket.