Social news site Digg has done away with the "Top Users" page. Digg founder Kevin Rose made the announcement last night in a lengthy post on the company's official blog.
The Top Users page was originally intended to both provide a sense of community to the general user base, and to give a bit of fame to the users who contributed the best stories to the site. If your submissions were really good, and you posted a lot of them, you climbed the ranks to earn a spot among the Digg elite.
Problems set in as Digg's popularity grew beyond the tech niche. Marketers and spammers quickly began looking at that Top Users list as a cold call sheet of Digg's most influential contributors, a field ripe for bribery. A few payola scams (where site owners offer cash payments and bribes to Digg users who post and promote stories about their products) have surfaced lately, but who knows how much of it is going on behind the scenes. Even if it's just a little, Digg had to make this move to preserve its integrity. The former Top Users page URL now redirects to Kevin's blog post.
The move is a sign of the changing tides in blogging and social media. Sites like Pay Per Post and Spike the Vote were exposed for openly asking bloggers and Diggers to write and promote positive reviews for money. This sort of thing pollutes the link pool, but isn't it just another fact of life on the internet? Spam is nothing new, and dishonest jerks have been around longer than the wheel.
Steve Rubel has an interesting prediction. This could be Yahoo's chance to swoop in and supplant Digg, he says. Personally, I don't think Digg is going anywhere anytime soon. These are just growing pains.
