Techcrunch: Top Digg Users Feeling Snubbed

I found the post on the difficulty of finding the right governance model for Digg to be very timely given a steady stream of media stories, conferences and blog posts on Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. As IT strategists consider technologies that are more socially-oriented, the issues highlighted in the full post on Techcrunch should remind everyone that free-wheeling organizational dynamics can be as counter-productive as the framework they seek to replace. Throwing technology out there (blogs, wikis, etc.) without considering the complex issues related to governance is a classic ready-fire-aim approach that consistently fails. The interplay between governance and institutions is critical to understand.

Institutions play an important role in any enterprise. When old ones no longer serve the best interests of its constituents, they are changed by constituents over time (through accepted methods), bypassed by constituents (in favor of counter-institutions that rise to a new level of power or influence), or they fall (of their own accord or through some level of forced transformation). There are also many different types of institutions. Some are formal (e.g., "the org chart"). Others are socially defined where "rules" are transferred via relationships and group affiliation (e.g., "this is the way we do things on this team"). The wave of interest in Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 reflects growing dissatisfaction with formal institutions and a desire to prioritize institutions that are more socially-oriented as a replacement or means of counteracting the domineering influence formal structures have within organizations that diminish agility, innovation and such.

This line-of-thought gets us back to the Digg post below. The reality check is that socially-oriented systems still require organizations to effectively address governance models, motivational needs of people, community relationships, social contracts (e.g., acceptable behavior), decision rights, conflict resolution, enforcement and a host of other items. Clearly organizations want to avoid a situation where systems promote anarchy as much as they want to avoid systems that reinforce overbearing command-and-control environments. Each enterprise needs to find their own sense of institutional balance within which socially-influenced systems thrive yet still satisfy the demands of formal structures related to security, identity, compliance, etc. Items discussed in this post related to the role/influence of "top users", leveling the participation playing field, dealing with members who try to "game the system", defining the "right" circumstance for banning people, are items that organizations need to ponder. The easy part is the technology when compared to these challenges. 

Digg continues to grow, claiming 20 million visitors per month and an increasing amount of mainstream attention. But as traffic to Digg has grown, the incentive to “game” the site to get stories to the home page has also increased. Digg fights the abuse by using a number of weapons (deleting offending accounts, changing the core algorithm, etc.). But in doing so they risk alienating their most active users, who complain that many of the changes to Digg affect them more than the spammers.

The most recent changes to the Digg algorithm are aimed at grouping users who tend to act as a single voting block, effectively neutralizing their ability to move stories to the home page by simply acting together. One user, noting that the result was a significant decline in the home page stories by top users, said “it looks like the Digg staff is looking to get rid of its frequent posters.”

Source: Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Top Digg Users Feeling Snubbed

Comments

[Ensim Hosting]

Digg is a community site and all users and stories should be treated equally. Digg should support the community and the Friends and not mess with the promotion algorithm, which doesn’t do anything to help build the community or encourage people to have Friends.

[Joe]

I think that Digg's algorythm should be tweaked a little bit, because the current one is alienating the newer users to the system. While they definitely should reward the most loyal users to the system, it's a matter of degree; when 100 users control 60% of the front page, it's unreasonable and obviously has nothing to do with the objective quality of the submissions.

To help newer users, I recently launched a site called MegaKarma.net. It basically lets users submit links to their digg articles, and then passes them around to our growing user base via email to vote up. Hopefully between the algorythm changes and services like mine, we will start to see some better content getting promoted.

-Joe