The unique metasite Digg.com has rolled out its third version in a year, with 3.0 launched today. Starting as a tech site with an audience similar to that of Slashdot, Digg.com now covers all news. The site's popularity, which has grown purely from word of mouth, has overtaken even that of The New York Times online. And all this occurred within a year. It's probably the single most important phenomenon on the computing scene today, although nobody wants to admit that since nobody really understands it. To understand utopianism is to understand Digg.

When I first saw Digg, I thought it to be an advanced or next-generation Slashdot-like community information exchange—simplified and streamlined, with no frills or general messiness. As kind of a brain-dead Slashdot, it is more in tune with the mass market.

In one sense, Digg symbolizes one of the key elements of the Internet: the prevalent do-it-yourself ethic. When combined in large communities, do-it-yourselfers can do amazing things.

In Digg's case, a large community of perhaps ten million users combs the Internet to find what they collectively think is interesting. They post these news items on Digg, where the other members of the community rank them. It's a self-sustaining democratic news-gathering operation that selects news, determines its importance, corrects errors, critiques reporting, slams inaccuracies, finds counterarguments, and reveals related information. It does this automatically and with no human intervention. And it probably does it better than a hired editorial staff of hundreds would.

There is no human intervention in Digg's process except for what the users themselves impose. They work for free. Utopian alert number one: Honk, honk, honk.

Now what has to gall the big organizations and probably every commercial Web site in the world is that this site has been doubling its page views monthly. It is now running at about 1 million unique visitors a day, with perhaps 9 million page views—while employing a staff of two or three people. Obviously there are more people than that needed to keep the servers working, but the business really boils down to Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, and a few of their coding pals. What they've done is this: They have built a self-generating content machine like nothing anyone has ever seen.

Meanwhile this democratization of the news, which is what Adelson harps on, is seen by the idealists in the community as profound. I see it as increasingly dangerous, for a number of reasons.

First, we get creeped-out blogs and podcasts that gush over Digg. It's here where you start to see the utopians crop up, with their often-loony notions. One podcaster I listened to recently, while interviewing Rose and Adelson, kept raving about Digg's greatness and repeating, like a mantra, "Why should The New York Times tell me what is important?" He sounded like a 12-year-old delinquent saying to his parents, "You can't tell me what to do!" before slamming the door to his room.

This sort of thinking has already been tested through the failure of so-called citizen journalists to wipe out newspapers as we know them. Uh, this was supposed to happen last year, I think.

Now, don't get me wrong. Digg works, and it's great, and Rose and Adelson are geniuses. It's the idealism and mystique that bothers me about Digg. Nobody has a bad thing to say about it. How does that work? I always consider that in itself a bad sign.

So let's change that.—Continue reading...

The Flaws in the System

Has anyone even thought about the possibility of news manipulators using this "democratic" mechanism? What proof is there that any of these "diggs" are accurate? I have no doubt that they are accurate today because the crew at Digg consists of honest folks, but what happens when Rupert Murdoch or Sumner Redstone runs it? Or when the government of China has its version?

Can Digg be rigged? And what happens if it ever gets rigged? Would people notice? Or would they just be happy that The New York Times editors are not "telling them what's important?"

What about tipping-point mechanisms? Anyone out there who has studied utopian concepts (and make no mistake, Digg is as utopian an idea as anything has ever been) knows that these mechanisms or societies succumb to dark forces. What would happen to the Digg site if say, Jerry Falwell and his legions, along with the Bush-supporting minions in the red states, flocked to Digg and actively promoted stories, slammed things they didn't like, and in the process drove away the current libertarian users? Digg as a mechanism would still work, right? It would still be democratic, right? Or would it? Is it ever democratic really?

Digg is an attractive site for most of us because it is our ilk that uses it. It is indeed a community of like-minded people with broad interests but all imbued with idealism regarding the usefulness of technology like this. Techno-populism! Huzzah! It's just great!

But make no mistake, this is utopianism in every way, and there has never been a utopian mechanism, society, or process that has worked for long before it fails. Digg, because of this history, is bound to suffer the same fate. It will get corrupted, collapse under its own weight, or just stop working. Until then, enjoy it while you can, comrades.

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