November 7th, 2006

Digg’s Disincentive Highlights Social Design Issues Clearly

The changes that Digg made to its promotion algorithm are coming back to haunt them. Diggers are pushing back, and in doing so are highlighting the difficult challenges of social design.

I chronicled Digg’s Design Dilemma back in September. At that point, after yet another claim of gaming had been made against them, Digg decided to alter its promotion algorithm to minimize the effect of the most popular Diggers…so that they didn’t have undue control over what was promoted to the home page. Digg had effectively changed the rules of its game.

Now, top Diggers are pushing back. Muhammad Saleem & Mark Johnson, two of Digg’s top users, wrote an open letter to the company complaining about the change. Here is their main argument:

“By creating an algorithm that punishes top users, and rewards new users you are creating several problems for Digg.

You are discouraging the active or successful users from contributing, since it becomes progressively harder for their stories to reach the front-page. If the more front-page stories you get, the harder it is to get more on the front-page, how do you expect to motivate people to keep on contributing?

You are preventing the most breaking and cutting edge news, contributed by the top users, from reaching the front-page in a timely manner. This creates two possible problems, either Digg will lose its competitive advantage for having all the breaking news first (since people will have already read the news elsewhere, while the top contributor’s story sits in the queue), or a new user will post a duplicate story, that because of the algorithm will make it to the front-page faster. Thus encouraging new users to submit duplicates.

You are creating a disincentive for people to hunt for cool stories. By allowing certain users to reach the front-page more easily, you create incentives for them to look for mediocre stories, because they know that odds are that the story will get to the front-page anyway.

I hope you see how this change will alienate any user who devotes more than just a few minutes a day contributing, and eventually lead to a major decline in the timeliness and quality of the content on Digg.”

Here Muhammed and Mark make some very interesting points. They want to use Digg, but don’t feel like it is worth their time anymore. Notice the words they use: motivation, contributing, encouraging, disincentive…this is social design in its most raw form. And somewhat ironic because the users are the ones who are telling the designers how to motivate them.

So what’s the problem with the design? Not usability, not visuals, not interaction ambiguity. The issues are social ones, probably unpredictable in any straightforward way. This is as clear an indication as any that design is a different animal now that people live their social lives online.

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Comments ( 6 Responses so far )

1. Matt Terenzio on November 7th, 2006 (Comment) #

Are these users sooo good that they pick magic stories? They only get one vote like everyone else, so I don’t understand why they should have a better chance of getting a story to the front page.

Admittedly, I’m not an avid user, so I might be missing something, but I can’t help but think that many of the users who are against the new system are just mad because they can’t game the system anymore.

2. Matt Terenzio on November 7th, 2006 (Comment) #

I re-read their argument and think I understand now. I just think it may have been the wrong solution. I think they need a more sophisticated algorithm, but not one that penalizes honest success.

3. Michal Migurski on November 7th, 2006 (Comment) #

I definitely take issue with the term “top users” - it draws focus to the competitive side of Digg, and (wrongly, IMO) suggests that there is something like a single axis along which Digg’s users can be ranked. These guys are the “top users” according to one measure, percentage of submitted stories hitting Digg’s front page. But that’s not the only metric, and it’s debatable whether having a smallish group of people driving the numbers day in day out is beneficial to other Digg users, regardless of how good they feel about. Think of the algorithm changes as an estate tax. =)

4. rdixon on November 7th, 2006 (Comment) #

The big “algo” change didn’t stay in effect for very long.
Just guessing, but I would say when they started seeing the daily page view stats dropping like a rock, they were forced to back off on the change.
And for those newbies who are complaining about not being able to push their own submissions to the front page due to lack of people who digg them: It is now even harder for you to get a submission promoted so in esseence your complaints have been detrimental to your cause. It now takes a minimum of 30 diggs to get a story promoted instead of just 15 for some catagories. If you couldn’t get 15 people to digg your submissions, how will you get 30?
Answer: Pay your dues. Invest the time and effort necessay to band together a group of like minded individuals who will digg what you submit. And good luck with that. The casual user who only visits once or twice per day will never achieve that goal.
I find it vey ironic that those who complain the loudest about perceived “gaming” at digg are the very ones who are trying so hard to do the same thing but failing miserably at it.

5. Josh on November 7th, 2006 (Comment) #

Good point, Michal. I was simply borrowing the term from Digg. From that standpoint, both Muhammad and Mark are in the Top 20.

Other axes are certainly open to debate. But, as I mentioned in my earlier piece on Digg, it is the very gaminess of the system that leads to stuff like this. It both drives adoption and leads to issues like this. That’s why I think this is as much about social design as anything.

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