Digg Can't Change Unless You Do

The general consensus on Digg is that it can be great again by becoming more like Reddit. A compelling argument to be sure. Reddit does seem to have fresher stories and virtually no complaints about "Power Users."

I think Digg can learn a lot from from Reddit. But due to its size, there are certain things that will be almost impossible to change:

Sheer size of Digg traffic crushes any small site

The most charming thing about Reddit (and early Digg) is that you can find these amazing stories from no name blogs that will literally change your life.

But most of these blogs won't survive a nano second under the scrutiny of Digg popularity. In fact, many small website owners have learned to block Digg completely from their servers.

Digg will never break news

99% of the time it takes at least a good 10 hours for a Digg story to go popular. Since Digg gets a lot more submissions than Reddit, Digg's algo requires more votes before promoting something to the front page.

Power Users don't have bad taste... we do

Many Digg users complain that great stories are being stifled by Power Users. This is a ridiculous claim.

The truth is, Power Users love great stories as much as anyone. Let's say argument sake that some Power Users are paid spammers. Even if a Power User is some sort of paid spammer, he still has to submit a large amount of legitimate content right? Woudn't his job be a lot more fun if he gets to read unique stories instead of the same crap from HuffPo, 4Chan, XKCD, etc?

But he can't submit unique stories because YOU WON'T VOTE FOR THEM. I think this Reddit classic sums it up pretty nicely.

If Digg users stop digging up XKCD comics, Power Users won't bother submitting them. Power Users respond to market forces... and guess what... YOU are the market. Of course, it is a lot more fun to blame a Power User than the nameless anon XKCD fan.

Digg will always be the sandbox for Reddit

Due to Digg's current popularity and more appealing visual design, it will always attract more social bookmarking newbies than Reddit. This means you get a lot of new users making mistakes, complaining about things they don't understand, and generally clogging up the tubes. (Nothing against the new users, of course. We were all new Diggers once.)

Once the new users get a good sense of how social bookmarking works, they learn about other options like Reddit, Mixx, and Delicious, and depending on their personal preferences they may move on to those sites.

Digg is the sandbox for Reddit, but unfortunately sometimes that means we're the litter box as well.

What Kevin Rose can't tell you

Kevin is no dummy. He knows all this stuff but he can't really say it explicitly. Because so many of these problems are inherent to a community of this size, there aren't any magic bullets.

That's why whenever the Digg community gets mad, he'll be the nice guy and come in to say some kind words about the development team. He'll promise to deal with the problem and might even ban some Power Users.

What else is he going to do? Admit that these are problems that will never truly go away while the company is looking for new sources of funding? Of course not. In his heart of hearts he probably wish we would grow the fuck up.

Ultimately the responsibility is on us to change things. Not just by signing petitions or conducting witchhunts (though those are fun don't get me wrong). Let's be active about burying stories we don't like. Let's venture beyond the homepage and look at as many new submissions as possible. When a new user asks a stupid question, help him out. If a fellow user complains about the quality of the story, engage them in discussion instead of throwing a smug remark like "oh you're just not smart enough to use Reddit like I do."

We keep yelling about how Digg belongs to the people. Well, if you want to be a citizen, you need to do your civic duty. Freedom is not free, and neither is Digg.