Animas Weblog

I have wondered how a service like Digg could stay true, in practice, to the democratic ideal that made it catch on. I just read this post prognosticating the Downfall of Digg, and I guess the answer is that it does not. I don’t follow it that much, but it seems inevitable that a service with incredible reach of Digg and a strong commercial incentive to manipulate the “democratic process” would be prone to manipulation. Similar to a dimension of search, Digg is becoming a marketplace for attention.

I would have assumed that opportunists would have made Digg bots with all the sophistication of the best PPC fraud clickbots. When I first dugg a few articles, I understood that wrapping a captcha challenge around digging helped prevent that, despite many smart folks working on breaking visual captchas. In fact, the manipulation is occurring through the same sorts of processes that happen in real human politics and social evolution. This is really just SEO lifted into a more explicitly democratic Web 2.0 environment where diggs, rather than links, determine how merit gets modeled.