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Growing Censorship Concerns at Digg
I find site rivalries boring, but growing concerns over Digg "censorship" have been submitted steadily for the last few months. Today two such stories were submitted so numerous that I had little choice but to post. The first claims that Digg is
the editor's playground- it explains how a few users control Digg, and that it's not really the 'Democracy' that they claim it to be. Personally I think this is all totally within the rights of their editors to choose content however they like. But it's less pleasant when combined with accounts getting banned for posting content critical of digg, and watching other content getting
removed for being critical of sponsors (also, here is Kevin Rose's reply).
The internet is a collection of tiny dictatorship. It's not a huge democratic thing, and it is even no anarchy (even though it comes as close to the classic definition of anarchy, where everyone governs himself and holds no power over others as it can come).
Every server is owned by someone. And he's the dictator. As benevolent or tyrannic as he wants to be. Those pages that claim they're "democratic" are so because the dictator decided it would be nice to let his "peasants", his users, act as the ruling body. But ultimately, he is in charge.
And ultimately, he hangs if something illegal happens on his page.
The difference to a true dictatorship is only that you have the power to vote with your feet. If the dictatorship isn't to your liking anymore, you can leave. That's it, though. There's no such thing as a virtual coup d'etat (well, you can hack the page, granted, but that's usually overthrown quickly again). You can pick your stuff up and head out. You can even create your own "land" and "declare independence".
But what it comes down to is, that every page, every server is owned by someone. And this someone decides what is displayed, who may write stuff, even who may read it. Like it or leave.
Of course, on the other hand, your "international relationships" (i.e. other pages writing about yours) will quickly go down the drain if you turn out as the new Josef Stalin. And other "countries" will cease their "diplomatic agreements", their links, with you.
So unless you're Google or some other virtual equivalent of the USA, better treat your users nicely.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As I have pointed out after previous mentions of Alexa, Digg has an obsession with Alexa stats that has lead many Digg users to install Alexa for the sake of adding to the view count for Digg.
Slashdot (and Digg for that matter), is like any organized group -- there will be people who will join because they want to commiserate with the like-minded, there will be people who are "just curious", and then there will be people of questionable character who are there to spread their own form of idiocy and bigotry. Can't be helped -- if you could do an accurate breakdown of membership by personality type, it would probably fit the Bell curve to a tee.
We're always going to suffer with this. I happen to think Slashdot's system, while not perfect, is certainly better than some. At least, despite the many times I have incurred some faction's wrath with my comments, I feel like I'm communicating with a fairly well-read and intelligent group most of the time. Some people don't like me and that's their perogative. I keep on posting because I think for the most part people appreciate my adding to the discourse and because I don't really care what others think ultimately, as they only have my posts to go by and don't know the real "me."
That said, I'd never want a faction to come along and mod me up all the time simply because they "like" me, anymore than I want a faction to mod me down because they "hate" me. I"ve noted an inequity now and again, as it's obvious someone doesn't have a sense of humor, doesn't understand my sense of humor, or got their hands on some mod points and plan to punish the "enemy." I think the moderation system here makes it harder for that kind of thing to go on, and I think Digg could learn a thing or two from the idea.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The main problem with digg at the moment is the inmature style of writing most of it users has. A quickly written story about a great thing (tm) will get more diggs than the carefully written one that is posted 5 minutes later. This is a huge disadvantage for digg as I have to read the awfully written summaries to find the goodies.
And I'm not even a native english-speaker.
But they rarely completely censor people here. Does the occasional bitchslap happen? Sure, but it usually gets plenty of attention, and the comment isn't summarily deleted, nor is the user account deleted. And how many posts have we seen that poke fun at slashdot, it's editors, or it's moderation system? I've seen plenty, and that's at +5. While it would be ideal that complaints about slashdot are listenened to and fixed, it speaks well of slashdot's operators that they are not summarily censored out of hand. Not to mention that many complaints about slashdot have been addressed, albeit not in a timely fashion.
Nathan's blog
While I don't think editors should "bitchslap" threads, it's hard to ignore the fact that every single comment in that thread is in fact off-topic ....
Depends on which President you ask and when. Clinton was handing 'em out like candy in 2001.
/. and Digg, I find a huge level of arrogance coming from the editors, who, in many cases, aren't doing anything to "merit" arrogance, if you know what I mean. Both forums also suffer from a surfeit of immature, ignorant or downright stupid comments. I think both are great experiments in collaborative communication, but there is room (IMO) for much more radical ideas.
/. has more substance, and /.'s forums, however low-tech and old-school they might be, have 10 times the good content than any Digg forum. The best feature /. ever added was the ability to be notified when someone replies to your post.
/.'s rather limited moderation compared to those of Digg where you can mod comments up and down till you're blue in the face (and the comment has dozens of + or - points).
:-)
On both
Digg tends to have more interesting "fluffy" or "neat" articles,
I think an interesting comparison would be to study the effects of
I find it rather odd that a score of +5 for a commment (given I have the karma bonus) means only 3 people out of hundreds of thousands of potential readers thought it worth modding up. What happens when 10 times as many people can mod and the mods can go 10 times as high or low? Will a better meritocracy of discussion emerge are will be just be giving the frost pisters and other morons more free reign to be infantile?
In the end, both sites are run by, and largely populated by, a bunch of know-it-all computer geeks, nerds, posers and wannabes, and this ultimately might be their biggest problem.
Now excuse me, I have some socket code to debug.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I thought this too until I read the story slashdot linked to. What you are describing are burried stories. As far as I can tell, you can still search for burried stories and you can view them if you want to.
The story linked to by slashdot gives you the links of the two stories the guy put up, and digg.com claims they do not exist. A really interesting thing is that this url: http://digg.com/technology/Suspicious_Digging_ goes to an error page, yet the title of the page shows "Suspicious Digging?" Notice the question mark at the end, which is not in the URL. Also, if you make up a fake story name like http://digg.com/technology/this_story_does_not_exi st you'll see a blank page without the error message.
I don't know if this is normal behavior. Seems like someone actually deleted the stories.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space