In some moves to somehow monitor the way digg.com functions their team has decided to remove the top users page.

This page basically showed the top users that have submitted the most content along with the amount of times their stories made it to the front page, all for digg glory (whatever that is). The way their system determined who was a top user was through a bunch of factors which included but were not limited to submitted stories, amount of stories promoted along with other things.

Why has this been done? To stop the perception among the general public, media outlets and you and me that this was probably the root cause of a complex web of gaming that most people knew were these top users controlling how and which stories made it to the front page along with trying to prevent future gaming.

I’m not going to speculate whether this was true or not. Nobody really knows if a bunch of diggers got together and promoted a story or got paid to submit a story linking to any particular website or even commenting positively. But I’m guessing that removing the list of top users is evidence enough that it has happened. But will this new strategy stop it?

I don’t think so because people will still try to game the system in new ways that will become more apparent in the future. It’s just up to the team over at digg to make sure that they are one step ahead and not a few steps behind, as they have been so far.

For nostalgic reasons here are some screenshots of the top digg users I took earlier.

Technorati Tags: digg, digg users, gaming

About the author

Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.