Benchmarking Digg’s Democracy

Digg’s democracy was put on a benchmark today when Ajay’s article “Why The Digg Mafia Will Cost Kevin Rose Millions!” was submitted at Digg. It received nearly 100 diggs within couple of hours and the story got marked as ‘promoted’, but it never hit the frontpage. As soon as it came to Digg’s attention, it was marked as inaccurate by them. Angry diggers started firing agitating through comments:

“The Digg staff will bury it, as they do with all articles with an anti-Digg slant. Nothing must disturb the Digg paradise world.”

“Made popular a few minutes ago. and now with the Digg message that the content may be inaccurate. In other words, the Mafia are working hard. Goodbye Digg. Good bye democracy. Perhaps time for something more …. delicious?”

“Final call to digg, Why don’t u let this story goto frontpage and take the openion of the fellow diggers, Is there any democrary in here or its just bunch of digital mobs ?”

“It says that the story has been made popular but it’s not appearing on the homepage….don’t be fooled. Someone is playing games here at Digg, or Digg’s system automatically adds ‘made popular’ once a certain threshold is reached…kinda makes a mockery of the fact that someone somewhere tried to bury this post…..”

I don’t get it, how can an opinion be inaccurate. Just because the article slightly opposes Digg, they can’t mark it as inaccurate. Come digg, this is just an opinion, not a cease and desist letter! This is an open world, where people can choose what’s right and what’s wrong. Why not leave it for the diggers to decide?

Don’t talk against Digg, Digg is god!
Digg tries to suppress all articles that fail agree with their ideology. Say something negative against Digg and pooof! You’re banned from Digg. If I started listing out the number of good sites banned by digg, this post would go endlessly long, so I’ll make it short: PaulStamatiou, CyberNet, Connected Internet, John Chow, TechBuzz and lots more…

Buries weigh more than Diggs
Strangely, Digg algorithm weighs more for buries than Diggs. So it doesn’t take any more than 10 buries to get you out of Digg (forever).

901am writes that Digg infringes upon its own principals of sending traffic back to the original source by embedding video content from video hosts like YouTube, Google Videos and Metacafe. Digg is killing their profitability by leeching their bandwidth and not sending traffic to their site. How fair is it?

When someone over IM or IRC asks me to Digg his/her post, I really feel bad to see the level of quality prevailing over Digg. Only a bunch of diggers have absolute control over the homepage (nearly 66% of the homepage is ruled by these members). How long will this go on? Alexa traffic stats clearly show traffic dipped faced by digg over the last 3 months.

Conclusion: I’m not against Digg or its mafia members, but I’m against their censorship policies. Good or Bad, Digg has to allow the community to choose. All we need is freedom!