Albeit on a very slow news day, the industry is buzzing about popular link-sharing Web site Digg, and claims that some "influential conservative" members are systematically downgrading thousands of
stories they deem to be too "liberal."
Online magazine
AlterNet claims to have
caught the "Digg Patriots" censuring "hundreds of users, dozens of Web sites, and thousands of stories" on Digg. Alternet claims that the group of about 100 is "able to bury over 90% of articles by
certain users and Web sites submitted within 1-3 hours."
"Digg is one of the most important social networking/Net story discovery services out there, and though its star is somewhat on
the wane at the moment, having one of your pieces hit the Digg front page is still a guaranteed way to push lots of extra visitor traffic to your website,"
writes Fast Company. "It's crowd-sourced, and crowd-voted -- though there are indeed ways to game Digg's story
algorithm, the basic principal is that the more people 'digg' your story, the higher up Digg's popular stories list it gets."
"Those of us who follow Digg have long known that Digg has
long been susceptible to external gaming,"
writes Computerworld. "While Digg's leader Kevin Rose has tried to keep this type of
thing from happening, the company's biggest efforts to clean up its social bookmarking system have ended up vexing some of its biggest fans."
Bigger picture,
as ReadWriteWeb notes, the "conspiracy" could have broad implications for the future of
crowd-sourced editorial tools, which are increasingly being adopted by top news publishers. "Such ogre-like behavior may inevitably overwhelm any kind of social news site," it writes. "Or there may
be an arms race between site owners and groups acting in bad faith."
Digg, currently undergoing a transition to a new website, says it will soon be imune to such group coercion when it
launches its next version.
Read the whole story at Alternet et al. »
Love Digg but this goes back to the sweeping generalizations made about the term crowdsourcing. What Ridley Scott and Digg do is more of an open call and polling. For crowdsourcing to work, the process, approach and philosophy need to be carefully considered. Incenitvizing people and having rules are vital to the right output and to avoiding gamesmanship.
Not saying we have it all figured out but you can see tongal.com to see what I am talking about.