True Democracy a Myth, on Digg and Elsewhere

A recent mass-banning action performed by Digg led Mashable to perform an interesting analysis on the evolution of the Digg community. It all started just a few years ago as a democratic environment in which the news were submitted by users and promoted towards the main page by user votes, or diggs.

Nowadays, Digg is struggling to redistribute the editorial power from a handful of so-called “top users” that have managed to gain control on most of Digg’s voting process, back to the majority of its users.

This is a very interesting human behavior case study, the same way StumbleUpon is. We can easily draw a parallel between these two virtual communities and the real world we live in. They all have started as a nice dream of democratic systems in which the power “belongs to the people”, but the power seems to either inevitably concentrate in the hands of a few or loose coherency. Oh well, I guess it’s just human nature, or, depending on how you want to see it, maybe it’s just the natural thing to happen.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 3:04 am and is filed under Thoughts, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “True Democracy a Myth, on Digg and Elsewhere”

  1. knud says on November 5th, 2008 at 7:57 pm :

    Hi

    I am working on a site which try to solve many of the problems with digg.com.
    You can find it on http://crowdnews.eu.

    The main problem with digg is the voting system.
    When only top voted stories get on the front page it has
    to be a subject that many can relate to,
    which result in stories with a low information content.

    Crowdnews solves this by using sharing instead of voting.
    Every have a personal news page on which they can subscribe to other users and when those users share stories they will appear on the personal news page.

    Join me on CrowdNews