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There’s an old saying. “All good things must come to an end.” For Digg.com, the end is coming sooner than you think. Take a look at this set of screenshots I took, comparing two Digg articles that are exactly identical, yet one is obtaining a massive amount of views, while the other is not.

If you can’t read what I wrote in the picture (I used Adobe Photoshop to add in the text), then I’ll explain it here. You submit a story and it picks up a few diggs. About an hour later, another user comes along and submits the exact same story with almost the exact same title, gets almost 3,000 diggs and makes the front page. He/she duplicates your content, takes all the credit, and you get screwed over.

(Image Created by Author)

I like to call these abusers “power-diggers” – a select set of people intentionally trying to gain popularity at the expense of others, and unfortunately succeeding at the same time. In a way, it’s like being bullied by a bunch of people who control the news media – in other words, a dictatorship. These groups of “power-diggers” control which stories get popular and which do not. And if they think a story you submitted to Digg will become popular, they’ll steal it from you and claim the link submittal as their own. “Power-diggers” only promote the stories of other “power-diggers,” thus getting only their articles to be displayed on Digg’s home page.

In a way, this abuse of Digg represents human nature. A lot of people in our society will do anything to trample over others and make it to the top. People who have been “trampled over” on Digg as a result of “power-diggers” have blamed two of Digg’s features: friend lists, and the ability to “shout” to friends telling them the stories a particular member wants to make it to the front page.

One Digg member states that, “This is why many Digg users have stopped submitting. They know it is highly unlikely their submissions will make the front page no matter how good their content is, but a power Digg user can submit something dumb like a photoshopped picture of pac-man at a graveyard and it will rise to the top, not because it is all that good, but because of the submitter’s connections.”

Another Digg member complains that, “It’s not just the stealing of stories, it’s also the lack of our stories even being heard in the first place.”

Many Digg members have switched over to Reddit, due to the fact that Reddit’s submissions are completely anonymous. Other members want Digg to find a way to resolve this problem, and prevent groups of “power-diggers” from working together to mass-promote a certain number of articles. Over 1,000 annoyed Digg members have already signed an electronic petition, trying to get Digg to change its promotion methods.

As long as groups of dictators control Digg, it will never be a democratic site to share thoughts and ideas, like it was designed to be. Once one group of “power-diggers” stops promoting content, another will take its place – maybe even marketers or advertisers trying to find a free way to get the name of a product or website out to the public. And what does Digg’s creator have to say about the situation? Nothing as of yet.

To conclude, I’ll leave you with this tidbit of information. My article entitled “Google AdSense: Not Worth the Time, Not Worth the Effort” may have made it to Digg’s front page, but it wasn’t my doing. The day it was approved by Triond editors, I didn’t even have a Digg account. Now, after submitting a couple of links to Digg, I’m seriously considering if Digg too is “Not Worth the Time, Not Worth the Effort.”

At least there’s one good thing about using Digg. Maybe you won’t get popular on Digg due to the “power-diggers” stealing your articles, but what those “power-diggers” don’t know is that if they do make your article popular, you’ll get one heck of a lot of views and money from Triond. They get more popular, but you and you alone get the money.