Following Up: So You Think There Are Digg IM Rings?

Surprisingly my blog post on Digg’s IM Epidemic made it to the front page of Digg (I expected it to get buried).

As I hoped conversation ensued. I realized through the comments on this blog and on the Digg post

I hope to go through them (when I get some spare time) to aggregate the best thoughts.

Overall here’s my impression.

Four camps

1. Duh – Gaming will happen. Digg is a game anyways. May the best man (or network) win. Read Tony Hung’s  thoughts.

2. This is going on and I’m sick of it. But alas – that’s the tide and I have to go with it (I might even fall into this category)

3. Snarky remark about how only nerds care (of course).

4. Ideas on how to fix the problem.

Once again: I don’t know what the answer is. I know I care about social news. It is a tool to engage people in the news. And that, my friends, is good for democracy. It is the lowest level of citizen journalism, but a step in that direction. Which is why I always approach it with a bit of an idealist attitude. I realize that for many it’s about money, getting eyes on pages which turns into advertising dollars. And when that is the bottom line – screw media literacy, someone will use whatever means possible to get a story on the front page. What I’m interested in is media literacy. I may soon come to the conclusion that Digg does not support this endeavor at all – in which case, I’ll decrease my activity even more. But as I said in the last post: I want Digg to succeed. I want Digg to remain relevant. It is the first major experiment in this endeavor and if it fails – we fail.

So I’m going to let the dust settle and in the new year revisit the notion that Digg’s IM epidemic is spoiling the content rotten. I will re-contact my anonymous sources (all top diggers) and give an honest assessment again. This time, however, I will also go off the comments from this first post. So thanks to all who contributed and stay tuned.