It seems that over the past several months, Digg has been waging a war against it’s own users and alienating the very people who have helped Digg to achieve its current level of success.
Since it’s never fair to make accusations without facts to back them up, let’s look at a couple of steps that Digg has taken over the last year or so. First, Digg went on a “power user” banning spree, which was allegedly a result of accusations of widespread script usage.
photo credit: Tyler Howarth
Next, Digg has secretly been auto burying certain users submission. In case you aren’t familiar with the term “auto bury,” it means that no matter how great a submission is or how many votes it receives, it is ultimately buried by Digg itself.
One of the most recent “anti-social” moves by Digg was to impose a two hundred Diggs per day limit on all users. If you happen to go over this limit, you will be presented with the following message:
photo from a_codepoet
In my opinion, although the first three examples were anything but ideal, I feel that Digg has really crossed the line with their latest move. The move I am referring to was their decision to completely remove all personal links from user profiles. This means that everything from web links to IM links are gone!
The social web is all about allowing users to connect with each other through different channels. However, by removing all of these alternate channels, Digg is literally throwing up a wall around their slice of the web.
Sure, users can still shout back and forth to each other on Digg, but what happens if they want to check out each others Flickr or Twitter?
At the end of the day, Digg users provide the content and the eyeballs for this entire site, so Digg should be willing to give something back in return. Instead, they have continued to increase the amount of restrictions on their users, and I really believe this latest move is the last straw.
Some people will say it is the power users gaming Digg, but it looks to me as if Digg itself is the biggest gamer of them all!
Please let us know your opinions on this in the comments below…
UPDATE: Well isn’t this just brilliant – it seems that a couple of hours after this post was published Digg has put the social links back in user profiles.
Very interesting. We would still like to hear your opinions on the topic so please carry on with the comments.
I just hope they keep the social links this time and don’t change their mind again in another week. 😉
