Digg is notoriously a success-case of Web 2.0 - or if you are tired of buzzwords, of user-published and reviewed content. Its traffic growth rate is tremendous and it shows the power of viral marketing and participatory communities in the success of a company. However, despite the obvious successes, there’s a lot to be said about the quality of Digg’s content recently.

Questionable quality or a different audience?

A site running off of a community (like Digg is) is only as valuable as the average of its users’ contributions. Also, digg’s audience has shifted from a community of early adopters and people passionate about web development and social networks, to a much bigger and younger audience, unhappy about the existing news portals and websites. This change had a huge impact on the topics Digg covers.

Before I move on, here are some examples of story titles that have recently been on Digg’s homepage:

• A Piano… From Flash not Wood
• Blast firewords in your computer (flash)
• One armed bass.
• Sure, I’m a webdesigner! I have Dreaweaver!
• Why Harry Potter must finally die
• If only gay sex caused global warming…
• PHP ASCII Art Generator, with COLOR!
• IE Rulez, Firefox Suxz (Sarcasm)
• The Marijuana Conspiracy - The Real Reason Hemp is Illegal
• Goldeneye (N64) was the worst singleplayer I had ever played…

These 10 examples from the last couple of days illustrate the point of this dissertion. For those with little time, subscribing to the Digg homepage RSS feed used to be a good way to stay up-to-date with what was going on in the world (and the web). Nowadays, however, the Digg front-page is full of stories like this, that aren’t either particularly informative or (if that’s what you’re looking for) funny.

Now, this isn’t about criticizing an audience - because Digg clearly serves the ones that keep visiting (or the system would have corrected itself already with bad stories being buried and good ones brought to the top) - but about showing how Digg is a good example of the impact of mass user-reviewing and submissions on content quality.

On wise crowds:

While the reason for the quality shift on Digg is easy to assert (its easier for stories to cross the front-page threshold given the enlarged audience), there’s a correlation between the audience and content that is interesting to look at. In James Surowiecki’s book “Wisdom of Crowds“, he points to four elements that generate a wise crowd:

Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts. Independence: People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them. Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge. Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

While Digg shows diversity of opinion and has a method for opinion aggregation, the audience clearly suffers from lack of opinion independence. Opinions of certain people on Digg influence those of others, and ultimately, that degenerates how topics are rated and promoted to the front page. I believe there’s also room for tweaking front-page promotion algorithms and make sure only really good stories emerge to the top.

Conclusions:

In my opinion, Digg has obvious problems when it comes to content quality, but there’s an underlying beauty to this whole “problem”. It will eventually fix itself as the audience stabilizes, grows and mutates. I’ve never been a huge fan of statistics, but applied to social networks, numbers can be strangely intrieguing.

I must wonder, though. How much of an impact can tweaking the numbers and algorithms for front-page promotion have on the quality of content that goes in? Is the average Digg reader and contributor a journalist in himself, or just someone else arguing that “Harry Potter must finally die”?

- Digg v3 party photo © Scott Beale (of Laughing Squid)