“Digg is democratizing digital media”
At Digg.com logged-in users can give it thumbs up to an article he/she likes and ‘digg it’, contributing to the popularity of that item. “Once a submission has earned a critical mass of Diggs, it becomes ‘popular’ and jumps to the homepage in its category. If it becomes one of the most popular, it qualifies as a ‘Top 10’. If a submission doesn’t receive enough Diggs within a certain time period, it eventually falls out of the ‘Upcoming’ section.”
A user can also give it the thumbs down and ‘bury’ it. Opening a dropdown menu containing categories such as duplicate story, spam, wrong topic, inaccurate and ‘OK, This is Lame.’ The same logic is applied to the comment section of the site.
Digg offers the option to change your vote on a comment: “If you’ve voted down a comment that you now want to support, just hit the thumbs-up button once to neutralize your down-vote and then a second to record your positive vote time (and vice-versa).” This does not apply the same way to votes on an article.
“You can un-Digg a story by logging in and clicking My Profile. Find the story in the Recent Activity section (or click the History tab) and you’ll find an un-Digg button next to each item. You can’t unbury a story, however.”
It is not visible to other users which articles have been buried by a certain user, in contrast to articles he/she has Digged. The company does not reveal how the algorithm behind this whole process works exactly to prevent users from “gaming the system.” But it “takes several factors into consideration, including (but not limited to) the number and diversity of Diggs, buries, the time the story was submitted and the topic.” Due to the mystery of around the exact workings of the algorithm and the identity of the buriers, it has also been the topic of discussion amongst (part of) the Digg community that claim the existence of so-called ‘Bury Brigade’ misusing the ‘bury’ option in an organized, collective manner to bury certain stories. And critizing the ‘bury’ option for being undemocratic, because of its anonymous nature and unaccountability. Thereby showing a resemblance to YouTube’s flagging campaigns and the type of reactions by the community. In reaction to users gaming the system, Kevin Rose announced an update in the algorithm on the company blog in September, 2006. To prevent people from gaming the system he does not disclose how it exactly works, but the update includes a “unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have a less promotion weight.” Which means that it would take a more diverse pool of diggers to get a story on the homepage.
In the end digg is yours to control. No matter which stories are promoted, it’s up to the masses to digg or bury them. If you see content you disagree with – bury it. If enough people do the same, the system will automatically remove the story.
This could be seen as a point where co-existing forms of convergence briefly meet, the grassroots convergence demands attention for what they experience as a problem and the corporate convergence reacts by adjusting the algorithm. In its turn this adjustment received a lot of critique from the community as well. But convergence is not an end-point, but an ongoing process.