Assignment 6: Option 1

Digg.com is a completely user based site. People post links of things they find on the internet that they think other people will be interested in. Anyone that joins the free site can post but you don’t need to register to view the sites. As the links are posted, people registered with the site can ‘Digg’ certain links that they find interesting. When a link has a lot of ‘diggs’ it moves towards the front page of the website. Most of the monitoring on the site is done by the large community of members. In addition to people ‘digging’ a story, they can also bury it and report it.

The creators of Digg managed to create a Leviathan that could be moderated democratically. It takes at least a few votes to bury a story and a few hundred diggs to bring a story to the front page. There is some moderation by the owners of the site. They will occasionally block comments and take down articles that they discover to be false.

In the digg community, there is a Leviathan in where the website is based on trusting the other members to post only articles that are true and to not fix the voting by registering multiple accounts and voting multiple times. People with multiple postings that trying to spread false news have their accounts suspended.

A criticism of Digg.com is that it could be used to cause large problems if it is unmonitored. It can be used to spread false rumors about a stock or company or to criticize a competitors company. Also, there is the ability for companies to pay people to digg them hundreds of times and move their site to the front page.

The social norm is to try to keep a powerful and useful tool going by posting only links that others should see and would benefit from seeing. People come to know and recognize this norm as they use the site. If people appreciate the site, they would not want to abuse it and would only try to add to it. If someone does try to do something that is not in the interest of the site, the large community realizes soon enough and buries the story fast. According to Wallace, “MacKinnon believes the Leviathan is there anyway because we want the Internet to flourish, and sense it will not unless we build a framework of trust … (69)” The willingness of the larger group to conform to what Digg.com stands for is what makes it work.