Monkey on Wordpress

Joystiq, one of the better* gaming blogs out there, has finallylaunched a podcast. Will it be worth it though?

Stop the presses, er, keyboards. Remember that feature on digg that wasn’t always there and then came on and nobody noticed and then it was taken away and everyone started making noise about it because writing something big about digg nets you traffic and attention? Me too. It seems digg has gone ahead and removed the feature that shows the number of stories you’ve had promoted to the front page.

Looking at the above image, I’m strangely still able to go on with my life. Will digg bounce back from this? What’s there to bounce back from? A company decided to make simple changes that will benefit the community in the future even if they don’t see it. What are users going to do? Go to reddit? Doubtful. Jump ship over to Netscape? Hardly. The hype machine chugs along yet again.

On february 1st, Kevin Rose announced on the Digg Blog that they would be removing the top users list for digg.com WHAT? Remove the top users list? But now what will the digg community have to show who is better than who? Nothing, that’s what and it’s great. When people start competing against each other, quality will dwindle and that’s a fact. What the digg community should be looking into doing is making the site the best, better than any competitors, even if they are just shameless clones.

The reason for this is clear, people in the top users list have the e-belly to get stories to the top. Even users who aren’t in the top 100 are being spammed with emails to digg stories for financial compensation. (I’m ranked in the second hundred and received such an email even though I think it was automatically generated.) The power of digg is great and people with products to peddle know this and will do anything to get their site to the front page. It’s gotten as far as organized sites, such as spikethevote. The removal of the list is just one of the measures to take place. I’ve spoken with Jay Adelson, digg’s CEO on this before and he explained to me that they just can’t game the system effectively, if at all. It’s not as simple as who gets the most stories to the front page. It’s a whole lot more complicated and we’ll leave it at that.

But the digg community is smart, or should we say, the competitors are. It appears that with the help of digg’s API, a new top users list rose from the ashes of the old one, thanks to Netscape. Okay, let’s back up a bit. While the man responsible for the list, Christopher Fink says that he made the new list of his own volition, even though he’s employed with Netscape. Conflict of interest? To an extent. I understand that people can more than work on projects on their own. Google employees do it, in fact, it’s part of their job. But even if he did it on his own, knowing who he works for, can you blame the backlash it’s causing?

The mere fact that Netscape exists in it’s current state is something people still seem to be displeased about. The “new” Netscape looks a lot like digg. That’s a fact. Jason Calacanis, as per usual, has his say on the issue, chiming in with:

Most of the top users I’ve talked to over the years are very, very driven by that top list. They want to climb higher, they talk about strategies to climb the rankings, they build tools to get to stories first, and they lament their inability to sustain their position when they fall.

Interesting. I recall reading in some comment on the issue where someone said they liked to think of digg as a game, using the list as a way to gauge your strength, not unlike a Role Playing Game. That’s all fine and dandy, but as stated before, this is not where the digg community needs to focus right now, but rather on the competition. I like to think of this issue not unlike post counts in forums. After time, the post counts seem to run the forum, with users of forums seeing persons with high post counts as more important. Do away with the post counts and suddenly, nobody cares, they focus on the quality of messages posted rather than the quantity.

In short, mister Fink should really just accept the backlash for what he did, not to say he did anything that anyone else may not have done.