News voting site digg is to re-adjust its story promotion algorithm to give less weight to votes from friends. Founder Kevin Rose writes on the digg blog:
This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.
The digg thread reporting the post has already — after 11 hours — garnered 211 comments. The current top user P9 — submitter of 1344 stories and 1113 comments — has apparently decided to resign:
As a direct result of your blog this evening. I will no longer no supporting Digg going forward. I bequeath my measly number one position to whoever wants to reign.
I’ve written before about digg friendship groups, as have a large number of other people. After a certain point, it seems they did more harm than good. After becoming enormously popular very quickly, growth of the site had petered out. These changes seem designed to bring more people into digg and restore the perception that stories are promoted on their merits, rather than because of who submitted them.
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[…] USA Today takes a pop at internet techies citing the Wisdom of Crowds, suggesting that the recent digg and wikipedia controversies may show the idea is fallacious. David Freedman takes another swipe in ‘What’s Next: The Idiocy of Crowds‘ published at Inc.com, saying that on the internet, “the scum tends to rise to the top”. […]
[…] I don’t think that even the proudest champion of Web 2.0 would claim that either of these sites are without problems. A lot of them are admitted by their owners, and have been covered here in earlier posts. The thing is, they are also quite good as they are, and are continuously evolving to become better. […]
[…] [**Actually, digg is interesting in this regard. The submission of stories is not anonymous, nor is the voting. This has led to lots of accusations of bloc voting, allegations of a self-reinforcing elite of top diggers, and adjustments to the promotion algorithm to try to prevent this. It is a strange amalgam of social community and wise-crowds news aggregator. The owners (and presumably enough of the users) want it that way. If the owners didn’t want the social community aspect, and the problems that has created, they’d remove all mention of user names and make voting anonymous. It’s my belief that the gaming aspect to digg is entirely intentional and part of what appears to make it so addictive to its fans.] Filed under web 2.0, social software, opinions and social news. | Tags: collective intelligence, digg, web 2.0, wikipedia, wisdom. var blogTool = “WordPress”; var blogURL = “http://twopointouch.com”; var blogTitle = “twopointouch: web 2.0, blogs and social media”; var postURL = “http://twopointouch.com/2006/11/27/wisdom-and-intelligence/”; var postTitle = “Wisdom and Intelligence”; var commentAuthorFieldName = “author”; var commentAuthorLoggedIn = false; var commentFormID = “commentform”; var commentTextFieldName = “comment”; var commentButtonName = “submit”; […]