Blog-a-torium
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Google Bucket Test Reveals Digg Mafia Buries
On July 17, 2008 City Social Marketing posted an excellent blog about a series of articles from TechCrunch titled Google Bucket Testing New Digg-like Interface. After reading the blog post I felt the writer left a few things out, while not emphasizing upon the problems well enough. Well folks, that is what Random Logic does best! Here goes.I've researched the Google Bucket Test and scrutinized the screen shots fairly well. I've reviewed numerous Anti-Google comments, as well as the Pro-Google commentary, and all of the others in between. I've reached the conclusion that Google is on the right track, providing they do not allow the features on their new interface to interfere with the Google Rankings or listings. I, like many of you, want the ability to see the results from my Google searches and decide for myself if the items appearing on my screen are what I want. I don't want someone else making that choice for me. Google already allows me to filter my searches by language and also provides a way of filtering out porn sites. I don't need some bozo with a `tude censoring my results all because they didn't get lucky at the bar last night ~ like a person can on Digg.
Rumors are flying over how Digg is going to be bought by Google, I am not sure about that, however if this new interface is "Digg-like" it just may be one more piece of the puzzle to show that the Digg/Google connection is a done deal or it's to show the Rose/Adelson Gang at Digg that they are simply asking for too much money for their program. This new Google Interface might be something to show Digg that they are not needed, nor will their program be worth a
once Google works out the bugs and implements their new interface. The possibilities can go to either extreme at this point, but it does seem likely that this new interface is showing us that the Digg deal is done and Google is trying to implement some of Digg's ideas into the Google search engines. Social Bookmarking can be a very useful tool, but not as long as people wish to use it for garbage posts which are actually better suited for message forums. Google can put Social Bookmarking's feet back on the road it was intended to take, instead of creating hundreds of little kaffee klatsches where people group together in tight little units and bury or spam the posts of those not inside their wee clique. There is no doubt that Digg has no intention on ridding their system of such characters. It does, however, seem that Google has every intention of not giving power to such meglomaniacs.
It was mentioned that there is an article on Digg called Digg Steal Interface From Digg For Testing, which is reported to have 3 buries. You can read about this on the CSM Blog, I won't restate the story here. I've also seen Ashmadai's Blog "Stop the Madness!" Digg Buries Out Of Hand and I concur with both parties. Digg needs to step up and take action with this "Bury Brigade" antics which has been going on for years now. Go check out Google sometime and see all the posts concerning the Bury Brigada and Digg Mafia, this abuse of the system has been around for a long time. This type of anti-social behavior is what is destroying Digg, far too many people are realizing that the odds of their articles ever making it to the main page are slim to none ~ if they don't have the blessings and support of a Digg Top User. People are not idiots, Digg, many can see that between 50% and 60% of the stories on the front page are by the Top 100. They also can figure out that a smaller percentage of those making it to the front page are the same ones promoting the Top Users' stories. This isn't rocket science it, it's simple math and a little bit of patience and time to research who is who. A good first step is by making the bury button a simple notification to the Digg moderators for them to check for inaccurate or illegal content. That is what a moderator does, moderate.
I don't expect any big changes from Digg, at least not until someone buys it and decides to change the whole set up. More than likely I see Digg being devalued and turning into another wasted group for sooner or later people will start leaving Digg for other sites. Digg might hide the fact by not allowing members to remove their accounts from Digg, thereby only showing increases in membership ~ like another big system on the net has done for over 10 years now, but it still won't hide the fact that people will simply move on and allow those content with being abused or abusing others to remain.
Labels: Digglike Interface, Edit Comment Search, Google Bucket Test
