More of Digg’s Mysterious Ways

Here’s one as food for thought on the Digg vibe. Yesterday, I saw a segment on BBC World about the free music download portal SpiralFrog. Scheduled to launch in December, this alleged iTunes killer is to offer music at no cost whatsoever, but instead be fully ad-supported. If you ask me, this seems like a rather strange way to attack the rising problem of illegal downloading and if it goes through, I think even fewer people will actually buy the music than is the case today.

In any case, that being about the gist of what I thought, I wrote a short post about it on a blog I have together with the fearless iguana expert Cuppojoe. (Which we should either resuscitate, by the way, or perhaps euthanize for good, am I right? That is the blog, not the iguana.)

The point, however, is that this story already got dugg, but seems to have been buried today by a duplicate. My problem is this duplicate was submitted by my blogging buddy Smaran of Das Blog. So, though it may look like I’m kind of kicking his lower back here, I think it’s actually rather cool of him and I hope he does take it well. This is about Digg, not him, of course.

Here’s a small timeline I reconstructed (all times CET and approximate).

10.00 a.m. Digg user Erwlas submits the story.
10.30 a.m. I see the story on the news.
11.00 a.m. I post about it.
12.00 p.m. Koregaonpark (my mate) submits the story as well.

Twenty-four hours later, I see the second story has made it to the front page (799 diggs) and the first one (35 diggs) got buried and called a dupe.

See, this is what I don’t quite get (or perhaps even like) about Digg. I am very happy for my pal that he made it to the front page, but I thought submitting a story first should somehow give you a fair go to make it to the top. Is this because my friend has more connections who will digg him? Or doesn’t it really matter, and is all of it quite susceptible to chance?

Trust me; this is not a story of spitefulness, revenge or resentment. I once submitted maybe three stories and got Dugg once, but that was months ago and I actually don’t follow things that close-up anymore. What does ‘concern’ me is that if the scoop doesn’t count anymore, what does? If it is unpredictable luck that moves the stories up or down, then what am I reading, the results of a lottery?

Digg itself has been ‘dugg and buried’ by hundreds of thousands over and over and it has its merits and its drawbacks, sure. This is a minor thing and greater issues have been addressed in the past, but if I can’t be sure of how these stories get there in the first place, how sure am I that I’m reading the hottest, top technology news in any case?

I know, I’m stretching things here and I should probably find better things to do than waste my time with this. So bury me if you like, or perhaps… maybe I’ll get dugg? It’s all a matter of chance.