Digg Risks Alienating Long-time Users with Its Battle Against Spammers

[mandy]

Digg continues to grow, claiming 20 million visitors per month and an increasing amount of mainstream attention. But as traffic to Digg has grown, the incentive to “game” the site to get stories to the home page has also increased. Digg fights the abuse by using a number of weapons (deleting offending accounts, changing the core algorithm, etc.). But in doing so they risk alienating their most active users, who complain that many of the changes to Digg affect them more than the spammers.

The most recent changes to the Digg algorithm are aimed at grouping users who tend to act as a single voting block, effectively neutralizing their ability to move stories to the home page by simply acting together. One user, noting that the result was a significant decline in the home page stories by top users, said “it looks like the Digg staff is looking to get rid of its frequent posters.”...

full article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/03/top...g-snubbed/