Interview with Digg's Kevin Rose, Pt 2: On Personalization and Fighting Spam
In Part 1 of my interview with digg founder Kevin Rose, we discussed digg's popularity, reputation systems and recent issues with GroupThink. In the final part of this interview, Kevin and I talk about digg's battle …
Context & Ripple Effects
Kevin Rose sits down for the second half of a two-part interview at a moment when Digg has real momentum to protect: the site raised $2.8 million in venture funding in October 2005 from big-name investors, barely a year after launching its user-ranked news service, and January 2006 Alexa data already showed its traffic catching up to Slashdot's despite the gap in age.
Part 1 covered that rise along with reputation systems and the GroupThink problem — the risk that a crowd-driven front page converges rather than diversifies. Part 2 turns to the operational underside of scale: personalization and the fight against spam, the two levers Rose has if the ranking system is going to stay trustworthy as submissions grow.
First-order effects
- Digg's own submitters and power users face immediate changes: any personalization or anti-spam mechanics Rose deploys reshape whose stories reach the front page, directly hitting those who game the voting queue.
Second-order effects
- Slashdot, watching a year-old upstart close the traffic gap per the January 2006 Alexa figures, is pushed to defend its editor-mediated model against Digg's crowd-ranking approach — or adopt elements of it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social-news sites compete less on which stories they carry than on the integrity of their voting and reputation systems, making spam-resistance and de-GroupThinking a core product feature rather than back-office hygiene.
The trend: User-ranked news aggregation is entering an arms-race phase where scaling the community forces platforms like Digg to industrialize trust and moderation systems to stay credible against editors-first rivals such as Slashdot.