Sometimes Crowds Aren't That Wise
Last week, computer book publisher SitePoint relayed a story about recent experiences with Digg that demonstrates that the Digg system is far from perfect. We've written recently on ReadWriteWeb about the decline and fall of quality on Digg …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-arc in a long-running debate over whether social voting can actually surface quality. O'Reilly had already framed the risk back in early 2006 with warnings about the madness of crowds, and by late 2006 critics were openly predicting Digg's downfall while CNET documented the big Digg rig — coordinated manipulation of the front page. SitePoint's account, relayed here by ReadWriteWeb, adds fresh first-hand evidence that the voting mechanism itself distorts what rises.
First-order effects
- Publishers like SitePoint now have concrete reasons to doubt that Digg exposure reflects genuine reader interest, complicating how they value and pursue social-news traffic.
- Digg's core product claim — that aggregated votes equal editorial quality — takes a direct credibility hit at a moment when ReadWriteWeb is already tracking declining content quality on the site.
Second-order effects
- Competing social news services can position themselves around curation and anti-gaming controls, turning Digg's manipulation problem into a differentiation opportunity.
- If publishers and power users lose faith in vote-based ranking, Digg faces pressure to add algorithmic or editorial layers — a tension its later redesigns would have to resolve.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a structural lesson for all user-generated ranking systems: unmoderated collective signals degrade as incentives to game them grow, forcing platforms toward hybrid human-algorithm curation.
- Sustained erosion of trust in crowd mechanisms could reshape how the industry thinks about 'wisdom of crowds' as a design principle, favoring smaller expert communities over mass voting.
The trend: Social voting platforms are learning that crowd wisdom decays into crowd manipulation without active curation, pushing social news toward hybrid editorial models.