Is SpikeTheVote *good* for Digg?

Friedrich Nietzsche said, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger". If that is true, is it possible that a site explicitly created to game Digg, could actually help Digg?

Spike the Vote is a new service whose stated mission is to game Digg. Spike's home page says it all: "... I created this little community here. We collectively vote each other's stories to the front page." This has naturally caused consternation and outrage in the blogging community - everyone from TechCrunch to Jason Calacanis has posts condemning this practice. Some have even speculated that this might be an effort by Digg itself to weed out the bad guys.

Of course, all these reactions are correct and proper. Digg is, after all, the ultimate expression of the Web 2.0 social-collaborative "community-will", the one that's supposed to free us from the tyranny of capricious newspaper editors and publishers, with their focus on doom-and-gloom disaster, crime and "human interest" stories. [Which it certainly does, although arguably it has its own points of focus, like SEO, Google and good copywriting.]

In theory, Digg is a democracy at work - everyone gets one vote [well, almost] and free will, and the stories that get the most votes, no matter how eclectic, make it to the front page. And that does happen, a lot of the time. But the system is far from perfect. As others have pointed out here and here, there is a barrier to entry - once you get those all-important first 30 votes, then your story has a real chance of making it to the front page, if enough people like it. Fail to get those initial votes, though, and not enough people ever see it for it to get that chance. This is a little bit like the "escape velocity" for a space ship - if you don't achieve it, your destination or payload no longer matter; you are going to fall back to Earth.

So here's my argument: While I agree that sites and services like SpikeTheVote and User/Submitter (see this article from the Blog Herald) go against the fundamental principles of Digg and subvert its democratic nature, one could argue that they are a reaction to current reality. Further, one could argue that these services expose some fundamental issues with the structure of voting in Digg. If a base number of initial votes are needed to get a story enough momentum to at least expose it to many users, who in turn may choose to vote it up or down, then is that so wrong? Like the boosters on the Space Shuttle, you're just giving the spacecraft enough momentum to attain escape velocity; beyond that, it has to get to the destination on its own.

Here's one potential way to improve the Digg voting algorithm (full disclosure: I've taken the essence of this idea from an open whitepaper about the Yahoo! Interaction Library) - all new submissions stay on the Upcoming page for a given period of time, say a few hours, and votes are counted but not displayed during the initial period, preventing "group-think". At the end of that period, votes are displayed and the regular algorithms take over; any articles with less than a certain threshold number of votes are unceremoniously dumped.

No doubt there are other (better?) ways to do this. But the bottom line is that a fairer system that provides some level of support for the initial phase of an article's life will not only improve Digg's effectiveness, but automatically reduce any incentives for cheating.

Other sites have faced this problem, most famously Google. SEO for search engine ranking is an ongoing battle between the big Search Engines and folks trying to game the system; arguably, the ranking algorithms get continuously improved and closer to "natural" ranking strategies because of this relentless matching of wits. Is it possible that gaming attacks like SpikeTheVote will cause a similar focus on algorithmic improvement at Digg?

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Update:
I suspect that SpikeTheVote falls into one of three categories. Read more ...

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Comments

[engtech]

all new submissions stay on the Upcoming page for a given period of time, say a few hours, and votes are counted but not displayed during the initial period, preventing "group-think". At the end of that period, votes are displayed and the regular algorithms take over; any articles with less than a certain threshold number of votes are unceremoniously dumped.

I think you just described how Reddit works. :)

[NitinK]

@engtech: If this is the way Reddit works, that's great! I think this is a superior strategy than Digg's, less susceptible to gaming.

[pandora bracelet uk]

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