The comments on the Digg post on “Shouting in the Data Centre” see here on this Blog disappointed me. I am not a great user of Digg and very few of my submissions have taken off. It is one of the feeds I subscribe to using Google Reader. It seems that I am obviously not interested in the same stuff as most of its users, but to find the majority of comments about the provenance of the Digg takes self reference to the point of absurdity. It reminded me of a very recent a post ‘openpeel’, called ‘5 Ways to fix Digg’, and it also reminds me of Simon Phipps’ comment,
“When you invent a system, you invent the system that games it!”.
Its a shame, but I suppose that the social software designers will have to become cleverer. It’s clearly a fact that a ‘karma’ systems attracts people to contribute to the ‘wisdom of crowds’, but also trying to measure the influence, popularity or even innovativeness/leadership of contributors often leads to anti-social, even destructive behaviour.
I wonder if Digg has jumped the shark as its user community has grown beyond an expertise focus and its designers loose the arms race with the gamers. Is there an alternative? I have considered for a while the use of ‘clubs‘, where feed consumers, i.e. me and you, qualify the contributors to our feeds, or membership is gated. ….
ooOOOoo
Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, reposted here in July 2016.