Digg v4: a sledgehammer to crack a nut?

I blogged here earlier this month on the Digg Patriots scandal. I wrote then that:

How Digg responds to this is going to tell us a lot about the limits of democracy on the web and the power of technological solutions to filter the worse bits of human nature.

Unfortunately Digg (a social recommendation website) is not turning out to be the clearest prism through which to view this issue. True, last week's release of Digg v4 sees some response to the problem of 'bury brigades', primarily through the removal of the so-called 'bury button'. But it simultaneously introduces another even more controversial innovation, in allowing big publishers to submit content automatically via RSS feeds, bringing their loyal subscribers in tow to vote stories up and effectively dominate the site's front page. The motivation behind both of these innovations (as well as a major overhaul of the site's visual design which make it look eerily like a branch of Facebook) is surely mixed - part need to monetise, part desire to improve user experience - and therefore it's harder to read the changes simply as a response to Digg Patriots and similar problems. So in answer to my own question in the title of this post: probably not.

But to the extent that the changes are, at least in part, a response to these problems, they may point to a retreat from the ideals of crowdsourcing. Digg have tilted power towards corporations (the automated submission through RSS feeds) and away from potentially troublesome users (removing the bury button). Corporations can, in whatever imperfect ways, often be held to account, and have the great virtue in this context of clearly being who they say they are, unlike users who often hide behind pseudonyms. By making these changes, has Digg effectively accepted that individual citizens therefore trust corporations more than they trust each other?

Digg and the guile of crowds

By now you've probably heard all you want to hear about the scandal uncovered by AlterNet of a group of militant US reactionaries using Digg's functionality to censor it by removing stories uncongenial to their extreme political views (or even in some cases apparently innocuous stories by people who hold uncongenial views - or even their friends). It's all over the web, having been picked up by Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and Stephen Fry on Twitter among others, and has even made the mainstream press. So we won't rehash the story here.

The angle that interests us is accountability. Crowd-based tools like Digg are held up in some quarters as an answer to enabling democractic accountability online. We ourselves have been particularly impressed with Dell's IdeaStorm, for example, which applies a Digg-style promote/demote functionality to ideas for product improvements sourced from the crowd. But the Digg Patriots scandal points to the fact that censorship needn't be centrally managed by malign organisations or governments, and that the tools provided with good intentions by websites like Yahoo! and Digg can be used by determined individuals to self-organise and subvert them. How Digg responds to this is going to tell us a lot about the limits of democracy on the web and the power of technological solutions to filter the worse bits of human nature.