digg: not what it appears
Kevin Rose tries to sell digg.com as a completely democratic way of sorting through news. A user submits an article, and, if enough people 'digg' the article (that is, click on a link that improves that submission's score), then the story eventually appears on the front page (after somewhere between 30 and 60 people have dugg it). The administrators of the site don't intervene unless enough people 'report' the story, in which case a warning goes up and then the story is eventually removed. I say again, this is how Rose tries to portray digg. After all, here's the first question in the About Digg page:
"What is digg?
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."
Too bad this isn't actually how it works. In reality, the administrators of digg.com routinely and secretly remove stories from the front page that they simply don't like. A prime example is this story, submitted by one Thomas Hawk, who recently discovered my friend Kris Tate's photo site Zooomr and wrote an article praising it. His submission to digg recieved over a hundred diggs, and no "content under review" messages appeared, yet the article was promptly removed from the front page. Other submissions, like one about VMware, made it to front page with only 30 diggs.
Why was Hawk's submission removed?
Could it have something to do with the fact that the CEO of Revision3 (the company that runs digg), Jay Adelson, happens to also be the founder and CTO of Equinix, and that a primary customer of Equinix is Yahoo, the parent company of Flickr?
Perhaps not, but I do smell some serious conflicts of interest here.
--Eoban
"What is digg?
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."
Too bad this isn't actually how it works. In reality, the administrators of digg.com routinely and secretly remove stories from the front page that they simply don't like. A prime example is this story, submitted by one Thomas Hawk, who recently discovered my friend Kris Tate's photo site Zooomr and wrote an article praising it. His submission to digg recieved over a hundred diggs, and no "content under review" messages appeared, yet the article was promptly removed from the front page. Other submissions, like one about VMware, made it to front page with only 30 diggs.
Why was Hawk's submission removed?
Could it have something to do with the fact that the CEO of Revision3 (the company that runs digg), Jay Adelson, happens to also be the founder and CTO of Equinix, and that a primary customer of Equinix is Yahoo, the parent company of Flickr?
Perhaps not, but I do smell some serious conflicts of interest here.
--Eoban