The Politics of Digg

This page is an attempt to summarize the topic of the Digg community from the POV of the Digg community. Please read the guidelines for 1POV articles before editing. Edits critical to this point of view aren't really welcome on this particular page, but feel free to comment on the talk page or contribute to an alternative article at:

• Critiques of Digg

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Digg is a news website with an emphasis on technology and science articles. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that many other news sites employ.

(See similar pages for Kuro5hin and Slashdot.)

Political Issues

Digg is somewhat unique in that it's user base fragments itself according to topic. People who select "All Topics" can be different from people who regularly watch "Political Opinions"... this changes the probability that the different kinds of people will see (and hence have an opportunity to vote on the importance of) different things, giving different areas potentially different biases. Here are issues with political relevance that frequently come up in the following Digg Editorial Areas...

Technology

Issues with political relevance that come up a lot are:

• List some.

Science

Issues with political relevance that come up a lot are:

World & Business

Digg's "Political News" section is under this heading. On most issues, Digg is polarized into a Leftist majority and a vocal (and hostile) Rightist minority. Many members of both factions frequently digg stories that are biased toward their own views and bury the others, and even more frequently accuse the other side of doing so. Because of disputes like this, it has been suggested that digg's democratic system is more suitable to a smaller, more homogenous user base.

The "World News" section is also quite popular. Many stories on religion are submitted here. Digg has a very large and vocal atheist/agnostic/secular/freethinker population, so most of these stories get into lengthy arguments about religion vs. secularism, and often touch on the topic of evolution and intelligent design. This also happens in the Science section.

Sports

Issues with political relevance that come up a lot are:

• List some.

Videos

Issues with political relevance that come up a lot are:

• List some.

Entertainment

Issues with political relevance that come up a lot are:

• List some.

Gaming

Issues with political relevance that come up a lot are:

• List some.

Who Is Digg?

Founders

The company or people behind digg, their ability to bias the content, and their political agendas.

The Community

What the community is like and how they can affect the content.

History

Digg started out as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson (who serves as CEO), all of whom currently play an active role in the management of the site.

"We started working on developing the site back in October 2004," Kevin Rose told Richard MacManus of ZDNet "We started toying around with the idea a couple of months prior to that, but it was early October when we actually started creating what would become the beta version of digg. The site launched to the world on December 5th 2004."

Although the domain name of Digg is registered under the name Jerimiah Udy, he is not one of the original founders of Digg, but rather a friend of Kevin Rose's. The domain name was registered under Jerimiah's name because Rose did not want others to know that he was associated with Digg. He wanted Digg to stand on its own and not become a message board for all things he personally stood for.

Kevin Rose's friend David Prager (The Screen Savers, This Week in Tech) originally wanted to call the site “Diggnation”, but Kevin wanted a simpler name. He chose the name "Digg", because users are able to "dig" stories, out of those submitted, up to the front page. The site was called “Digg” instead of “Dig” because the domain name “dig.com” was previously registered by the Walt Disney Company.

“Diggnation” would eventually be used as the title of Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht's weekly podcast.

The original design was free of advertisements, and was designed by Dan Rice. But as Digg became more popular, Google AdSense was added to generate revenue. The site was updated in July 2005, to "Version 2.0". The new Digg featured a friends list, the ability to "digg" a story without being redirected to a "success" page, and a new interface designed by Daniel Burka, of the web design company silverorange. After the redesign, some users complained about the lack of the simplistic, minimalist layout used in the original version of Digg. The site developers have stated that in future versions a more minimalist design will likely be employed. On Monday June 26, 2006 V3 of Digg was released with specific categories for Technology, Science, World & Business, Videos, Entertainment and Gaming as well as a View All section where all categories are merged. A Sports category was added about a month later.

Digg has grown large enough that submissions sometimes create a sudden swarm of traffic to the "dugg" website. This is referred to by some Digg users as "the Digg effect" and by some others as the site being "dugg to death". However, in many cases stories are linked on many of the popular bookmarking sites at the same time. For example, a story may be linked simultaneously at Fark.com, Boingboing.net, and Slashdot.org. In such cases, the impact of the "digg effect" is difficult to assess.

Timeline

• 2004 - December: Digg.com launches.
• 2005 - July: Digg launches a new design with version 2.0.
• 2005 - October: Digg receives $2.8 million from venture capital groups and investors to support its continued growth.
• 2005 - November: Digg.com surpasses the 100,000 registered users mark.
• 2005 - December: "Digg Spy" updated and enhanced to Digg Spy v2 with new features including a live and dynamic behind-the-scenes peek into story submissions, diggings, comment submissions and the like. The right-hand navigation bar also received a new look.
• 2006 - February: Digg is listed on Alexa [1] as one of the most visited 500 websites on the Internet.
• 2006 - March: The Digg Team releases new, threaded comment system to digg users.
• 2006 - March: Digg surpasses 200,000 registered users.
• 2006 - April: Digg surpasses rival site Slashdot and enters top 100 sites of the internet on Alexa's rankings
• 2006 - June: Shortly before the Digg 3.0 upgrade, founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson reported that Digg had received 8.5 million unique visitors in May and was routinely seeing 3,000+ new story submissions daily.
• 2006 - 26 June: Digg goes down for 3.0 upgrade at 12:14 UTC. The upgrade was completed at 13:05 UTC.
• 2006 - 25 July: Digg launches Digg Labs.

[2]. Google searches for "digg," "slashdot," and "fark" appear to roughly coincide with Alexa's rankings [3].

Comments From Diggers

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Standardized Testamonials

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Links

• Wikipedia on Digg