Kevin Rose: Digg Expanding to Images, Restaurant and Product Reviews
Update: Now with video! — See also: 7 Ways to Stick it to the RIAA — On Friday, Kevin Rose spoke via video link at TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam, outlining Digg's plans for expansion.
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg spent December 2006 shipping new features, then took a bruising May: a DMCA takedown fight over the '09 F9' HD-DVD key ended with users flooding the site, followed by confirmed reports that stories were being buried internally to keep them off the homepage. Against that backdrop, Kevin Rose appeared by video at TheNextWeb in Amsterdam to say the voting model would extend past news links into images and restaurant and product reviews.
The announcement lands while Rose's own focus is under question: GigaOM reported in May that he was reportedly starting a third startup with Daniel Burka and Leah Culver — unconfirmed, but it frames how much bandwidth sits behind this expansion. Read/WriteWeb carried word of the same conference remarks, so the plan reached the early-adopter audience Digg lives or dies by.
First-order effects
- Digg users gain submission categories beyond news links, putting the site's voting mechanic in direct competition with dedicated photo-sharing, restaurant-review, and product-review services.
- The expansion raises the moderation load just weeks after confirmed accusations of internal burying — every new vertical adds homepage real estate worth gaming.
Second-order effects
- Review rankings steer real spending, so vote manipulation shifts from a reputation nuisance to a commercial target, making Digg's anti-gaming systems product infrastructure rather than community hygiene.
- Established review and photo services face a traffic rival whose distribution advantage is an existing, engaged voting community rather than a search budget.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, crowd-ranking spreads from headlines across consumer content generally, positioning 'what the crowd ranked first' as a default interface for local and shopping decisions.
- Who can promote, bury, or censor a submission — the exact fault line exposed in the May burying controversy — becomes a structural design question for any ranking-driven service, not just a Digg governance issue.
The trend: Social voting is extending from news aggregation into every category of online content, turning governance of the vote itself into the core product problem.