Digg This!

Digg is fucking doomed if they don’t ditch the “bury” button.

The very notion that you’d want a bunch of teenagers having the power to decide an article’s merits is asinine and a prime example of why pure democracy never works and always leads to mob rule. In the case of Digg, you end up with articles being deliberately buried by mobs of single-minded fanatics who don’t like what was written and don’t think other people should read them. The idea of a direct vote like this sounds great on paper — ooh, everyone gets a say — but in reality what you end up with is 51% of the people telling the other 49% what to do and how to think. It’s the ultimate form of disenfranchisement, and it’s the direct result of pure democracy.

Fixing Digg would be simple. Make it so you can “digg” an article or not, but eliminate the power to bury. In this way an article’s prominence would be the result of its popularity rather than its unpopularity, and nobody would be able to deliberately censor content.