A problem with Digg

Digg is a cool site, but the folks at Forever Geek have found a big problem with it.

The concept behind Digg, for those of you who don’t know, is this: People find Web pages that interest them (blog entries, cool sites, whatever), and “digg” them — that means, essentially, telling other Digg users “I think this is interesting.”

Other users then check it out, and the more people who “digg” a story, the higher it moves on the Digg site. It’s kind of like a “most-read stories” for the entire Web.

The important thing is that Digg is entirely user driven. There aren’t supposed to be editors choosing the most popular stories; it’s all about the number of votes they get.

But that turns out not to be the case. This Think Geek entry explains in detail how apparently the Digg editors are not only promoting some stories themselves, but also banning the digging of any story critical of Digg.

In fact, apparently “digging” the Forever Geek story I’ve linked to got at least one user banned from Digg. If you try to submit it now, you get a message, “This URL has been reported by users and cannot be submitted at this time.”

As Forever Geek pointed out, it’s the Digg owners’ site and they can make whatever rules they want to. No problem with that. But it seems a bit disingenuous to claim “With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do,” when in fact that’s not entirely the case.