As many of you may already know, a while back Digg introduced a great "friends" system that allowed you to track what your friends Dugg/submitted. This was designed to help you find good stories from good submitters. It was great, then it got changed.
I have been reading the blogs of various big name Diggers and it now appears that the Digg friends system was a Trojan horse.
Yep, a Trojan horse. We were told to use the friend system as it would help us find the good stories posted by people for whom we often Digg.
It was all a lie. Once we began to enjoy the new feature many users were accused of gaming the system by voting in blocks.
But, wasn't that the whole point of the friends system? What happened to the "Wisdom of Crowds" that Kevin was spouting?
The Digg friends feature turned into the biggest slap in the face for all Digg users.
Because of this, I have removed all friends from my Digg account and I would ask you to do the same.
Rather than use the Digg friend system, why not just bring up the users page on Digg and bookmark it? If you bookmark it you can check it to see what they have Dugg and/or submitted for that day. To go one better, you can even subscribe to the RSS feed of their Digging activities!
Digg was not first to market in the social bookmarking field, but they have done very well thus far. I'm afraid all the talk of selling out for $150M may have gotten to some people's heads. I hate to bring up "friendster" but... There are Digg clones popping up left and right and if Kevin Rose and company continue to treat their top users like crap well... We might find less Digging and more voting in our collective future.
