Community. Social. User-generated content. These are the words that surround many of today’s most popular sites, but what happens when these words turn negative and the social community that creates user-generated content gets out of control? I wrote “Looking For Pr0n? Netscape.com Can Set You Up” to demonstrate when the community aspect of your site can backfire on you.
The community has turned on Digg at times, but not enough to warrant any major changes or effect it’s growing popularity. I don’t think 98% of the Digg community cares who the top Diggers are or why they are always on the frontpage. What Digg has to worry about though is what happens when those top Diggers start to post crappy content continuously.
Sure it’s a democratic system so bad content shouldn’t filter to the top, but if you know anything about gaming Digg, you know that all you need is a couple influential Diggs and you are on the homepage. Just goes to show that no system is really democratic and no matter what a group of individuals can seize control of the majority of the system. You see it on Wikipedia as well.
Is there a perfect solution to this? Not in my mind because you will always have certain members that are more dedicated to the site than others. Thing is though anybody has the power to either become part of the elite or form another group to take over the stop spot. That’s what makes these democratic systems.
Originally posted on October 6, 2006 @ 3:22 pm