Digg has become the site du jour. Like MySpace was last month.
The idea that users will vote with their mice, endorsing stories with merit so others will read it, sounds great.
Trouble is it's false.
Anyone who saw the old Weakest Link show fail in the U.S. knows how it works. Once the mediocre see the truly excellent in action, they dump on them, supporting instead other mediocrities they think they can beat.
If you don't believe that last statement, then watch American Idol -- the same thing happens. Excellent singers are voted down when there are a bunch to choose from. The winners or runner-ups often turn out to be no-talent but attractive hacks.
Boingboing quotes today from a statement by Fark.Com founder Drew Curtis to thie effect, and links to a post claiming that Digg editors are manipulating the results. If they have any sense they are.
Journalists trained to go after excellence, who are allowed to go after excellence (and not manipulated it against it by editors or publishers) usually find it. They have an incentive to be fair, and to be right.
Most of us don't have such an incentive, so we do what we like. We either base everything on our prejudices, or we lack experience in differentiating good from bad, of we think Desperate Housewives is Great TV.
Democracy is not a perfect system. Maybe it's not even a good system. It just happens to be better than other systems for organizing governments. It doesn't bring the great men to the top of the stack, at least not often.
If you want to run a popularity contest then run a popularity contest. Traffic counts, and dollars, still mean more than anything else. If that means this blog is crap until people find it, that's the perception.
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