Digg announced today that it was removing the “Top Diggers” area of the site. This is the area of the site that shows who are the most active and most influential members of the community.
Digg’s efforts to obfuscate the identity of their top users is incredibly short-sighted. It is the equivalent of security* through obscurity. In other words, they hope that by making information less accessible, people will be less likely to abuse that information. On the contrary, making the “Top Diggers” information less accessible is only going to make that information more valuable and desirable.
For example, take Prosper.com, a peer lending site. At Prosper there is incredible value in knowing who are the most successful and most active lenders. If you’re a lender on Prosper.com, and you know who is generating the greatest return on their loans, then you can piggy-back on the leading lenders’ loans. However, Prosper.com does not provide public statistics about who are the most successful lenders on the site. So, one of Prosper’s passionate users created his own site filled with statistics about the most successful lenders by crawling Prosper and slicing up the data. He saw a need for information transparency because of the value of the metadata and jumped on the opportunity.
The same behavior has already cropped up on digg. A user recreated the “Top Diggers” page by mining the metadata, most likely by the API. If Digg blocks API access to the offending site, then that site will fade away, but another rise up in its place. Trying to cover-up who the top diggers are is a cat-and-mouse game that Digg will inevitably lose. Found this page via Calacanis.
Additionally, removing the “Top Diggers” section of the site reduces the incentive to participate at Digg because it greatly reduces the value of reputation on the site. It no longer matters if the links you post are any good because there is aggregation of public reputation to incentive good performance. This removal also reducing the feeling of social validation that the “Top Diggers” get for their hard work. Though the top diggers technically work for no monetary compensation, they do not work for “free.” They work for social currency, reputation, and Digg’s removal of the “Top Diggers” section throws a bomb at that incentive.
* By “security” I mean security against gaming, not network security - the context in which this phrase is normally used
I don’t think he used the API. Screen-scraping is VERY easy to do with a script. No API necessary. So yes, it will be a cat-and-mouse game if Digg tries to shut these lists down (which I doubt they’ll try).
great great post, andrew. it reminds me - on thursday night i went to a talk with jimmy wales. he said you always have to assume that users will act constructively. taking it a step further from what jimmy said, i imagine once you start adding rules to stop users from acting destructively, the moral fabric of the community collapses.
Joe, You’re absolutely right about the screenscraping instead of the API. TC confirmed it.
Sarah,
I’m jealous you got into the Jimmy Wales talk. I showed up at the time the talk was supposed to start and the line was out the door. They ended up turning me away due to lack of seats. Bummer. I think your extension of his insight is spot on, if you expect and design for the detrimental behavior from your users, you’ll likely get it what you expect. Hope it was a good talk.