Digg User Rankings Now Completely Gone

It looks like Digg is pushing a bunch of new changes live this morning. One of the most significant ones is the absence of User Rankings from profile pages. As I covered last week, Digg had removed their Top Users list but this list was soon recreated by Chris Finke by scraping the profile pages of Digg’s users. Well it looks like those ranking numbers are now gone for good. Let’s take a look at the profile of Digg’s top user digitalgopher.

Here is the information that was publicly displayed on February 1, 2007 (via Google’s cache).

Here is what the same profile looks like today:

Two pieces of information are now missing. Overall Ranking and Profile Views. It looks like this will put an end to the Erik’s current version of the Top Users list as there is no (public) place on Digg to scrape the ranking from now. Added: I guess that you could just grab the number from “News and Video Made Popular” as that is essentially what determines your ranking in the Top Users.

What’s more valuable – Digg users feeling satisfaction for contributing to a flourishing community or Digg preventing people from gaming the system by contacting their top users? The top users obviously know not to listen to the marketers who are trying to game it. Many Digg users use Digg as a competitive entertainment. Getting a story to the homepage is the short-run high while moving up in the rankings is the long-term goal. Now only part of that incentive remains…

Digg user HMTKSteve had some interesting thoughts about how Digg could fix their “gaming” problems:

1) Dump the friends feature – As nice as it is to be able to find out what your friends are digging and submitting this feature makes it far to easy to game Digg. At the very least, remove the ability to digg a story from the friends area.

2) Force users to follow the link to the story before being able to digg it – This might take a bit more work on the part of the coders at digg but it would probably be the best method to combat Digg fraud. Forcing people to open up the story and look at it will negate the diggers who digg something because it has a snappy title or want to bookmark it to read later.

3) Add a new kind of digg called a ‘bookmark’ – This new style of Digg would allow a user to bookmark the story for later reading and digging. This ‘zero weight’ digg would allow those who do not have the time to read a story now to mark it for later reading without inflating it’s digg count.

I don’t agree with dumping the Friends feature because that is really what makes Digg a “social network”. If you remove that Digg essentially becomes another news site. His other two suggestions are spot on though.

There is also a new format for submitted stories. Here is what you would previously see:

Here is what you now see for the same story:

Fasten your seat-belts because the Digg ride is just beginning and things are surely going to keep getting more interesting….

Update: Frantic Industries points out that:

Digg has taken additional measures against identifying top Digg users, together with some cosmetic changes to Digg’s interface. Before, the number of stories promoted to the front page was visible next to the user names in the ‘Who dugg or blogged this story’ section.