Ian Betteridge links to an interesting idea: Digg is Usenet 2.0.
Digg will become more and more like an overcrowded Usenet board – the trolls will end up owning it.
As Ian says:
Anyone with a smattering of knowledge about the history of Usenet knows that “the wisdom of crowds†is an absurd idea. Individuals within crowds might be wise, but there’s no guarentee that their voice will be the one you hear emerge.
Comments
0 responses to “Web 2.0 or USENET 2.0?”
I’m not sure I agree with that. The problem with Usenet is that there’s no real way to sort the good posts from the bad, so prolific posters can flood the boards and drive away the interesting people. What digg has tried to do (and managed fairly successfully) is to find a way to get the good stuff to rise to the top (positive votes, and weighting attached to digg users who have had lots of stories promoted to the front page), and the bad stuff to sink (negative votes). There are other less visible ways to accomplish this, too — number of clicks, time spent reading posts, etc. I have no idea whether digg uses these factors in weighting a story, but if they don’t yet I’m sure they’re testing it. I seem to remember newsvine.com saying they would take those kind of things into consideration in ordering the stories on the main page.
I haven’t looked properly at Digg for a wee bit actually, but doesn’t the voting/burying system lend itself to cliques or street team tomfoolery?
Fully agree that Digg’s very proactive in trying to prevent people from gaming the system, though.