Well, as we see that most of the blogs are talking about the recent changes in the Digg’s algorithm so I thought that let me push my 2 cents too.
Well, after the change was done it was evident that Top Digg user’s won’t like it as the power was taken away from them and as expected there was an open-letter published for Kevin Rose and team; Thanks to Darren Rowse’s Open letter to Adsense team, Open-Letter’s are in fashion again :
1. Open letter to Feedburner.
2. Well, you can see the list of Open letters of last week.
Anyway, getting back to the topic the open letter suggests that few top diggers are going to stop submitting the stories and are in a mood to show their power to the Digg’s management.
Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson responded to the Top digg users in a live chat, which has been covered by TechiPedia, however, it seems that Digg management wants to take things under their control a bit and don’t want to kneel down in front of the top users.
Raj Dash gives a decent explanation of what will happen and what can be the work around to this situation :
Stories could require OVER 100 votes before they’ll get on the home page, according to Rose himself.
Sites with already huge readership are less likely to be affected because they already have a more natural "diversity" of early votes.
New sites with small readerships have to try extra hard to become popular. The same type of article on an already popular site will always gain more votes. I’ve seen it time and again. Once you’re popular, substandard articles can still do relatively well.
Friend networks - the whole essence of social media - are being discounted as a result.
Well, apart from all this the important and interesting thing is that many bloggers are happy about the changes which have taken at Digg because they were not happy with the fact that the whole Digg show is run by Top Digg Users only and we can see that in the form of comments and the way people are rating the comments.
Well, I wonder that if this change will make digg a better community or will it be one of the point, where people will finally move away from Digg.
What do you think, what’ll happen to digg community, I think it’s far away from collapsing and I think that people are getting fed up of the control which Top digg users have, so the community will diversify just exactly what Kevin and team wants.
Influence of top users will reduce, and it is important for that to happen.
However, what worries me is the increased no. of diggs required.
Considering that Digg is already slow in picking up hot stories, this new feature will surely slow it down further. The no. of stories hitting front page will reduce, thereby increasing exposure and traffic for the sites that are dugg - usualy large blogs and sites. That is more unfair than it used to be :(
Hot users were infact manipulators….let them go to hell…this step is welcome….
Well, definitely top users are dissatisfied because their influence is going to drop.
As you said popular sites are easily going to get ‘diverse’ votes whereas other relatively unpopular sites are going to be suffering a bit.
Considering that a story requires more diverse votes to reach a front page, digg should also consider holding stories in the upcoming section for *more than* 24 hrs.
Usually, a story vanishes from the upcoming section and never reaches front page if it doesn’t reach the ‘threshold’ required in 24 hours. :)
That’s my 2 cents.
I guess this is a welcome step. I have never been dugg, but I strongly feel Stumble upon is the best Social site as it wont bring your site down and also gives more consistent traffic than Digg