The Drill Down

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1. The Drill Down » Blog Archive » Drill Bits 024 has been moved to 1/28 says:

   January 25, 2008 at 5:34 am

   [...] been pushed to Tuesday, January 28th, so that we may expedite the release of the 2nd half of our conversation with Digg founders Jay Adelson & Kevin Rose. We apologize for the inconvenience. Posted by andy Filed in Announcements, Drill Bits, Show [...]
2. The Drill Down » Blog Archive » The Drill Down 025A - RevoltNation, Part 1: The Issue at Hand says:

   January 25, 2008 at 12:05 pm

   [...] in a statement. In part 1, we discuss those grievances, and what we expect from Digg in response. In part 2, Jay Adelson & Kevin Rose, founders & operators of Digg, address those concerns. (Apologies for the poor audio quality of this weeks’ episode. Major technical issues!)   [...]
3. Rooo says:

   January 25, 2008 at 3:28 pm

   Nice of Kevin and Jay to come on the show. They risked a lot but it was worth it.

   Like you guys said, a forum about digg is much needed for times like these. On the other hand, I can see how a forum could also be breeding ground for ‘digg my stories’ post which is kind of redundant.

   But if only this was more organized, so many people try to talk at once and Zaibatsu’s a nice guy and all but his voice is a bit whiney/annoying and how many times must he say “we’re on digg everyday, we submit stories”? Also think this could feel less uncomfortable to listen to if you guys lighten up a bit, put a little sense of humor in there.

   I don’t see folks like facebook doing anything like this, when they first opened up their blog with comments enabled, they quickly closed it and ever since then, it feels there’s no line of communication.
4. Atropos says:

   January 25, 2008 at 3:52 pm

   You guys should get a favicon, TDD gets lost within the gazillion tabs I have open
5. Four20 says:

   January 25, 2008 at 4:34 pm

   I bet you’ll get a Wikipedia page now
   :p
6. Ryan Roper says:

   January 25, 2008 at 9:09 pm

   The excited stuttering makes this difficult to listen to. I can understand when people get frustrated it happens… but please try to calm down and emulate the speaking style of Jay and Kevin, so that the points you are making doesn’t come across as whining.

   Thank you for your contribution. I will be frequenting your site.
7. webddict says:

   January 26, 2008 at 4:02 pm

   I think this meeting provided a good amount of success in the right direct at least. If anyone is interested I have the chat log transcript of this Drill Down here.
   http://openpresswire.com/static/diggprerevolt3chattranscript.html
8. Orelses says:

   January 27, 2008 at 7:00 am

   Where do these chats “meetings” take place with the top Digg users. I’m ranked a low 657 or something in the Digg top users, but I would be very interested to be a part of a council that gives input on the future of Digg etc…
9. andy says:

   January 28, 2008 at 6:03 pm

   I repost this reply from reader ededit from the comments to this article: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2008/01/digg_revolt

   While this reply is critical, it’s also very well thought-out and stated:

   It seems to me that the chief problem here is a lack of consistent definition/lack of understanding of the relationship between Digg and its users. I’m not affiliated with Digg, so this is only a guess, but my guess would be that when the original idea was pitched it went something like this:

   Let’s have a site where a mass of users, maybe millions of users, will all contribute stories of interest to them and then that same mass of users will casually vote on stories that they agree are interesting. The stories that are voted most highly will be promoted to the front page according to some rating/scoring system, where they’ll be most visible. The result will be kind of a loosely ordered collection of stories that are compelling especially when considered as a whole.

   I think that’s the rough sketch of the idea.

   That is an entirely different thing than having a select, small group of people in charge of the content of a site. That’s more of an editorial review process. It seems to be almost the opposite of what Digg is supposed to be. Honestly, I use Digg in a way that I think is much more typical or representative of the millions of other users than any of the hundreds of people interested in reading a chat transcript or listening to the audio of a standoff between Digg and a handful of contributers.

   If you want to be consulted about the content of a news site, then get a job working for wired.com or one of the endless other similar sites. As far as lack of communication, it would almost seem to be a requirement of Digg’s model, not unlike what Google does or the people who are responsible for rating restaurants.

   The more people know about the process, the easier it is to game. The people who publish the Michelin Guide have been doing it this way (i.e. being secretive about the process) for over 100 years, so it’s certainly nothing new. If Google spelled out the full details of their ranking alrorithms, it would completely invalidate what they’re doing. I don’t see how it’s any different for Digg.

   As a contributer, you should be concerned about content, not your singular reputation. If you submit interesting content, and keep in mind that “interesting” is a highly subjective and variable concept, then its fate is linked to the effectiveness of the model.

   Again, this is not unlike Google. There’s an entire industry build around SEO and Google’s position has always been consistent: Do something legitimate, make sure the content has a well-formed structure, something that’s favorable to being indexed and don’t worry about the rest of it.

   It’s in Google’s best interest to return the most appropriate results. If that’s your site, then it will be returned at the top of the results. If it’s not your site, then it’s appropriate that your site not be returned at the top of the results.

   There’s already sufficient advantage to them in doing it this way. Their entire business hinges on it. They don’t need to disclose the details because the model is transparent even if the specifics of the operation aren’t.

   When you spend some time with Google you realize that if there’s an authoritative source for a term, it’s the one returned in response to a query. For example, if you do a search for Perl documentation, you get Perl documentation, and from the source you would expect. And that’s reliable regardless of any changes that they make in their algorithm.

   The people who have a problem are the middling operations; somebody who swears up and down that their shoe emporium for people with large feet is the most important large shoe operation in the world because they sell more shoes on the south side of Kansas City than anybody else within a 3/4-mile radius. The fact that they desperately want that to be true because they depend on it being true for their business to be successful, is not really Google’s problem.

   The same is true for Digg. I realize that there’s a small group of people operating on Digg who feel that they’re very important; even if only defined by the massive amount of time and effort that they’ve invested in someone eles’s business. I hate to break it to them, but that’s just not real.

   There’s a funny thing about being the top anything. It would seem to confer some sort of special status. But it really has nothing to do with the individual at the top. If the best anyone in anything were to disappear tomorrow, there would instantly be a new #1. What’s more, that person may rise to the challenge of being at the top to do as good a job or better than the person who held the job previously. It happens all the time.

   The people who are important to Digg work for Digg. Otherwise, we’re all the same. Would the service be different without a handful of people contributing a ton of stories? Probably. Would it be better or worse? I wouldn’t know one way or the other, and the point is, neither do you.

   By the way, I’m glad you feel good about the fact that Kevin Rose and whoever else showed up to your chat; that’s called being patronized. Do you know any more about the algorithm changes now than you did before? Did they promise to set things back to the way they were straight away? Or did they tell you ‘hey, we understand your concerns’, ‘you’re very important to us’, ‘going forward we’ll do everything we can to blah blah blah…’?

   All of that means absolutely nothing. And in response to that, you backed down, which was pretty much your only recourse in the first place. From the prospective of an objective observer, and someone who’s geniunely interested in seeing Digg being as good as it can be, I wish that they would have called the bluff. If there are issues, related to spam or otherwise being masked by a small group of people, then better remove the variable the obscuring the problems so that they can be resolved. Maybe next time.
10. Mark says:

    January 29, 2008 at 4:31 pm

    Ah, so you are in denial. Delete anything that proves you wrong. The masses will prevail over you!
11. from revolt to resolution in 12 hours or less – by [muhammad.saleem] says:

    January 31, 2008 at 3:37 am

    [...] part 2 has also been [...]
12. Social Blend 05.2 - Episode Stripe: Revolting Digg says:

    February 1, 2008 at 6:30 am

    [...] The Drill Down 025B – RevoltNation Part 2: Jay and Kevin Respond http://thedrilldown.com/?p=60 [...]
13. digg town halls announced : kazpro.com says:

    February 4, 2008 at 2:18 pm

    [...] first results of our conversation with kevin and jay are already here. we’re always looking for ways to have more conversations with you to learn how [...]
14. Rob says:

    February 6, 2008 at 12:15 pm

    I love that on the net you don’t even have to own shares in the company to get the CEO’s attention!

    http://blog.findlikeminds.com/2008/01/26/diggs-take-on-the-revolt/
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