What happens when Digg goes insane?


Digg is a great social networking site. I use it to see the highest rated stories, which lets me save time. Sometimes I enjoy reading the comments, as they have more information about the story posted.

Slashdot used to be my favorite site for things like this, but Digg seems to be faster since it doesn’t rely on a human to approve what is posted. What Slashdot does have is group moderation of comments that works very well. The comments on Slashdot are sometimes worth more than the posted story.

Digg has group moderation in place for comments and it seems to work most of the time. There have been two times in the past where it looks to have failed completely.



The first time I noticed this was a story about IBM using Napoleon Dynamite to encrypt data . It was a farly incocous article, but take a look at the comments. They’ve all been moded down. If you look through the comments you’ll notice that some are worthwhile. Who knows why the group did this, but it took away the value of the page.

digg moderation insane 1

I chalked this up to being a fluke, but then I noticed in an article about modding down comments, all the comments were modded down. Yes, it is very funny, but also shows the abuse that can happen when everyone has the same amount of power.

digg moderation insane 2

See, this is where the Slashdot comment moderation system shines. Only a handful of people can moderate comments and then their moderation can be meta-moderated.

Related posts:

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  2. Digg goes insane with comments another time
  3. The New Netscape … Digg has nothing to worry about
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