Announcements: Lifehacker's official Digg policy
Our brother site Gizmodo just clarified their Digg policy, so we thought it was high time we do the same. — First, let's state the obvious: Do we love the traffic that a link from the Digg.com front page brings into Lifehacker? Of course we do!
Context & Ripple Effects
Lifehacker's policy post lands at a charged moment: Digg had spent May 2007 in open revolt after attempting to remove posts containing the '09 F9' HD-DVD encryption key, followed by confirmed accusations that stories were being internally buried to keep them off the homepage. Against that backdrop, a publisher stating plainly how it relates to Digg reads less like housekeeping and more like a response to a community questioning who games the front page.
The announcement also caps an arc of Digg's rise from niche aggregator to traffic engine — TechBeat flagged in June 2006 that Digg was heading beyond its geek base, CNET profiled the site's grip on publisher referrals that December, and Digg launched its Friends feature last September. Gizmodo, Lifehacker's brother site under the same ownership, published its own Digg policy clarification on or about the same day, making this a coordinated two-site statement rather than a solo move.
First-order effects
- Lifehacker and Gizmodo have put their relationship with Digg on the record — admitting the value of front-page referral traffic while drawing lines against spamming the service, which gives their readers and Digg users a stated rulebook.
Second-order effects
- Sibling and rival blogs now face pressure to publish comparable policies, since staying silent looks evasive amid confirmed claims that Digg stories were being buried behind the scenes; Digg itself gains de facto publisher-endorsed etiquette standards without writing them.
Third-order effects
- If publishers keep codifying their social-news conduct, the informal norms of community-driven aggregation harden into industry practice — with each censorship flare-up like the May 2007 '09 F9' episode forcing both Digg and publishers to define where promotion ends and manipulation begins.
The trend: As social-news aggregators become decisive referral sources, publishers are shifting from ad-hoc submission behavior to formal written policies governing how they court those communities.