The Problems of No Human Filters and True Democracy

There’s a tempest in a teacup on Digg tonight. Jason Calacanis and his team of writers at Weblogs Inc. stand accused of ‘gaming Digg’, by submitting entries and then emailing Netscape/AOL staff to ‘digg’ (that is, vote for) this stories. There’s keening, wailing and gnashing of teeth on the aforementioned Digg entry, with one commenter calling the culture of Digg a ‘true democracy’. Spare us the rhetoric.

There’s already a blog dedicated to the cause:

To add insult to injury, these Digg ‘submitters’ will even submit a story if another website has already accumulated several Diggs for the story. Not only does this confuse Digg users, it blocks the original poster from receiving any credit for their submission.

Digg’s new “most popular” upcoming stories feature and other ‘Labs’ projects make the tactic even more effective, because once one of their stories gets 20-something Diggs it is put in front of many more eyes, and invariably gets the 10-15 more Diggs it needs to make the front page.

I know for a fact that this kind of group digging occurs elsewhere on the web. After all, Digg actually encourages this behaviour by enabling ‘digg this’ functionality on other websites. If I regularly asked you, my dear readers, to digg my posts (as opposed to just dig my posts), the results would look much like Calacanis’s team’s work.

The only difference–and it’s an important one–is that Calacanis is alledgedly asking his employees to dig stories.

Why does this sort of thing never happens on Slashdot? It’s much harder to game human filters, and they use a small group of editors. Any purely automatic system is going get p0wned sooner or later. See also Usenet forums, metatags and, more recently, blog comment spam. Technorati tags and their brethren are, I expect, next in line.