Bennett Haselton has written an essay for Slashdot in which he proposes a two-tiered system that would stop cheating on Digg. His plan was formulated after reading Annalee Newitz's Wired News story "I Bought Votes on Digg."
In theory, Haselton's proposal would curb the most common method of gaming Digg, in which people send "Hey, Digg my story!" e-mails to friends and coworkers. But the fix would kill the fundamental motivation that drives the Digg user community.
Instead of letting Digg users browse the site and vote on particular stories however they see fit, Haselton proposes to present Digg visitors with a random sampling of newly submitted stories along one side of the page. Those submissions would need to receive a threshold number of votes -- say, 100 -- before they could move onto the main part of the page, where traditional digg/bury voting would then apply.
To prevent gaming, users would no longer be able to go to an entry for a specific URL and vote on it. Only votes clicked within the random-selection sidebar would count. Haselton says he borrowed this idea from hotornot.com.
Maybe this proposal would curb cheating, but it would destroy Digg.
Most people use Digg in one of two ways: They read stories as they become popular and reach the site's various top-level pages, or they read new stories through the discovery channels Digg has set up. These include category-specific feeds, visualization tools, and "Upcoming" buckets for new submissions.
Either way, Digg users like to browse the stories within a topic and vote for those they care about, adding credibility where they think it's due. Under Haselton's proposal the number of relevant stories each user gets to interact with would be greatly reduced. The number of low-value stories presented to each user would go way up.
The random-sample model would make it a lot more work to browse for worthy stories. Digg isn't supposed to be work. It's supposed to be fun. Under the guise of making Digg more fair, this proposal would kill users' motivation to go to the site and vote. Without that spark, Digg might soon be dead.
[Wired News and Reddit, a Digg competitor, are both owned by the same parent company, CondeNet]
