The Digg Bannings: Why They Were Inevitable

In the world of social media, you'd have to have been hiding under a rock to have not heard all the furor over the digg bannings that have gone on. The headliner of them all was the banning of Zaibatsu, for which I haven't heard much of an explanation from Digg (if something has come out about this let me know). I've heard Reg's side of things, and I can imagine that he'd be more than a little pissed. I don't blame him. He and many of the other top diggers who legitimately contribute to the community (no scripts and what not) spent hours each day contributing, digging, and so forth. For the big three (Zaibatsu, Mr. Baby Man, and MSaleem), I remember hearing on a podcast that they can spend up to 6 hours a day on Digg. Just do the math and figure out how huge of a time committment that is during the year.

And Here's the Door...
So to suddenly get canned by the site that you've dedicated so much time to is definitely grounds for being angry, but I think there's an unfortunate reality that Digg had to deal with. Check this out from their "about us:"

"We’re committed to giving every piece of content on the web an equal shot at being the next big thing."

And that statement just isn't true. Every piece of content is not equal. I've been around digg for awhile, and I'm not a power user. But I can work up a piece of content into the 200 digg range with my friends list and sharing shouts. The newby user who submits the same piece of content has almost no shot at that unless s/he gets lucky and the topic just hits a cord with a couple of the right people who shout it around.

Dealing with the Digg Oligarchy
This isn't news to anyone, but what had happened was that a kind of digg oligarchy had formed up. And they were submitting the same types of technology and political news submissions. They in some ways were limiting the opportunities of Digg to expand past the 18-34 yr old, Web geek, Obama supporting, Nasa loving, and environmentalist user that had really forged the site. Because what was getting popular continued to appeal to the same types of users. And new users really didn't have a great chance of getting popular. It kept feeding the cycle. So digg decided to start levelling the playing field: the digg bannings.

Is this biting Digg in the butt? Maybe. But compete.com shows digg with traffic above 26 million, which is its biggest number over the last year. The bannings have momentarily opened up some access to get into the friends lists of other power users still on digg. Perhaps this will open the door for a greater breadth of topics to make it to the popular page and start drawing the attention of new user segments. If it doesn't, other than knocking out the script use that was going on, I'm thinking that it'll give them a short-term boost from all the talk about the site and people wanting to check it out. But will this really help break up the oligarchy or will it just form again? I'd guess the latter until Digg can figure out a way to better connect relevant content with each individual user. I know they're working on it with the recommendation engine, but I'm not won over it by that tool yet.

And from another view, I think that they've opened the door wider for competition to engage with their power users in a better way.

Standing in the Wings: Mixx.com
I've written about mixx before, and the digg bannings have created a small exodus of key individuals from digg to mixx. Mixx has a lot of ingenuity and cool stuff going on there, and now they've got a few big named ex-diggers (Zaibatsu) to drive it forward. I heard a rumor about a site re-design in the works, but they've already got tons of cool functionality. Their traffic keeps skyrocketing according to compete.com, but what I wonder is how they'll treat their power users as things progress so that they don't end up in digg's predicament one day.

As for the losers in all of this, I think it's pretty clear that the power users have really taken it in the keister. That stinks. Really. It does. I think digg owes them a little more than that. Could you imagine Wikipedia suddenly canning its top content editors? Good bye! Too bad, so sad. But I won't belabor this point. I think learning how to engage with power users is always a tricky thing in social media, and this time, Digg got caught in a bind between their goals for a content democracy and loyalty to some of the people that have made it what it is. We'll just have to wait and see what this means and if other sites out there, can learn and do better.