A year has passed since you posted this, but I figured I’d submit my non-spam comment anyway

I posted a follow up on this issue a short while ago, after a recent post by Muhammad Saleem. I’d be honored to hear your thoughts.

Scott: that’s true, and it depends on how the site is presented to those new visitors. The tyranny of the front page may lessen with each new non-techie user if they have the tools they need to find their appropriate niche area in the larger Digg universe. Every “Digg This” button on blog posts or news stories helps this effect along, because it leads new visitors to the specific story page on Digg rather than the entry page.

You also touched upon the fundamental problem with Digg’s format: the stories simply get dugg to the top of the list. All someone has to do is buy enough votes to get onto the front page – voila! Loads of traffic.

The number 2 site in the social news world, reddit, has a natural defence against this abuse because the front page is a constantly rising and falling list of links. For someone to really game the system, it would take a seriously prolonged effort of constantly up-voting the link. It’s why I think reddit is where it is today and with a spam-free front page.

This is not a critique of Digg but rather a musing on whether elements of Digg are necessary for this kind of social media model. Once you get beyond the young male techie demographic that Digg has captured to, say, your average AOL or Yahoo news user, I think the inscrutability of the system is very much an issue.

“Anyone coming to the Digg homepage for the first time would have no idea what these numbers mean — even insiders, despite all the speculation on Digg’s algorithm, don’t really know for sure what these numbers mean. So what’s the point really?”

Everyone knows what those numbers mean: it’s the number of votes a story has received from individual users. Of course, what you’re questioning is the relationship between those numbers and the presence of each story on the front page, but that’s hardly the kind of meta-consideration occupying the minds of every Digg visitor. I realize that as a media pundit/professional, it’s *your* interest in Digg, but you are not necessarily representative of the user base. I personally find niche stories pretty interesting on the site, and as a reader I *don’t care* whether they manage to cross the magic boundary or induce a torrent of traffic.

Yes, but the frontpage is the seperation between all stories and the best stories (according to digg users).

Yes, and the value of one Digg for crossing that dividing between “all” and “best” is unknown — I’m not saying the Digg algorithm is not effective for surfacing stories that users value, because it clearly is for a lot of people. I’m saying that displaying the number of Diggs as if they all counted the same for is misleading and that displaying then at all is perhaps unecessary.

I’m a member of other sites like reddit and del.icio.us, but it’s hard for me to find a “good” story at those places. I probably end up looking at 5-10 pages before I find one that is useful to me. At digg, the members sort out the best stories for you. Now I”m not saying that bad stories don’t make the front page, because they obviously do, but for hte most part I like how it works.

None of those stories would have made the long-term popular lists without having made the front page first — cracking the front page is when the Diggs really “count,” if you will. Check your stats for your recent experience with Digg — where did most of the referrals come from, the front page or the long-term popular lists?

Look at this: http://digg.com/view/all/popular/thismonth
You can’t tell me that the most popular stories in a month are based on nothing at all.